There are a few common mistakes that people new to SEO often make. 

Understanding Google’s Index

Put yourself in the shoes of an internet marketer whose money site has been ranking first in Google for the targeted keyword. Everything’s going well, you’re competitors seem clueless about how to outrank you and your high rankings mean your bringing home the big bucks. Then one day you check Google and see you’ve been dropped to number 5 on page one, then you look again the next day and your site is stuck on page three. It’s every web marketer’s worst nightmare.

If this was a hypothetical client that came to SEO Consult, we would examine their website to try and find the reason that the site had suddenly dropped after a time of SERP superiority. One reason we might find is that the site in question had stopped acquiring organic backlinks once it had achieved its number one ranking. Or it might have even stopped building links at the same velocity as it had to help it get to the number one ranking.

Something a lot of people don’t realize about Google’s index is that it is rolling, not static. There are pages rolling in and out of their index all the time, and as those pages fluctuate in and out of the index, so will your backlinks. Backlinks do not last forever, and over time, if you stop link building your site will lose enough links that when there is a big ranking recalculation, your site may appear to have been penalized.

The moral of the story is that you should never stop actively building links, and this applies whether the hat you wear is blacker than midnight on a moonless night, or a shade of white so bright that it makes all the A-lister smiles in Hollywood seem dull. Remember that you can save a lot of pressure and anxiety on yourself just by building links over time, and not thinking that when you hit the number one spot in Google that you have won. Remember Google’s rolling index and how it can affect your SEO!