Those of us who blog on a regular basis know that we serve one master, Google.
When I first started blogging the concentration wasn't specifically on how to please Google, it was more about building an attractive website and finding the right IDX. The IDX in the early days was what brought visitors to my site. I picked the right one at the time, Diverse Solutions, which did its job. The search engines started crawling my website due to the way the IDX was feeding them listings. Enter a address and more often than not I would come up on or near page one. I relied greatly on the IDX which brought me a lot of business and became my main marketing strategy. I wasn't really obsessed with what Google was thinking.
Don't get me wrong, I was still blogging. I would write market reports and concentrate on a couple of niche areas which supplemented the success of the IDX. I was gliding along thinking I was made.
Then you started to hear about Google algorithms. Some mystical, intangible tool used to make sure no one gets too comfortable.
Little by little I, like others, started to drop in the SERPS (search engine results pages),d but it wasn't terrible. Then this year we got hit big time. All of us who were relying on our IDXs found our indexed pages plummeted. Google got wise and realized that there was a ton of duplicate content out there and started to give that content less attention. After all there are hundreds if not thousands of websites showing the same listings. I no longer am anywhere near the top when looking for a particular listing, and I dropped from 250K indexed to 70K.
It was a shock because I hadn't been driving myself nuts thinking about what I should be blogging about, and now I need to do the hard work again.
Google has not abandoned me because I wrote a post yesterday about grannny flats and got a call today with a question from someone who had entered "granny flat laws" as a search term. Up I came.
So, if you do it right, you can please the boss. Google will always give you another chance.
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