It might send marketers into a panic if they check their content analytics and notice a dip in search traffic to their websites for top-ranking keywords. SEOs ask themselves if they have done anything different that could be considered black hat, and they check for any new Google updates that might have impacted their rankings.
In an age when most businesses receive the vast majority of leads through their websites, it makes sense that a small performance dip demands attention. All the same, Google’s Search Engineer Matt Cutts recently released a Webmaster Help Channel video that puts things into perspective.
Every week, Google’s webspam team receives 5,000 reconsideration requests – that’s 20,000 a month. Cutts says Google’s teams are in charge of monitoring and tracking 250 million domains and due to that scale, the search engine’s staff cannot give every webmaster the personal attention and guidance she seeks when something goes wrong with an SEO strategy.
Brafton has covered other recent updates from Cutts that reported marketers will not see examples listed in Webmasters Tools if they have been penalized with a manual webspam action. This information might be the next-best-thing for panicked SEOs who need to find solutions when their brand content loses ground in SERPs. Of course, companies can avoid search ranking punishments by sticking to white hat content marketing and SEO practices – strategies to which all marketers should be privy.
