Are you putting all your eggs in the search engine basket when it comes to building your blog? Focusing your efforts on search engines to bring in visitors and build a reader base is a good way to build up your blog, but if it is the only method you are using then you are literally placing the life of your blog in the hands of Google et al.
Is pandering to the search engines a bad thing? No, not at all. Search engine traffic is a great source of residual traffic that can work for you 24 hours a day. Ranking high for popular keywords means you are going to have a steady flow of visitors streaming to your site.
You are one bad day away from obscurity
If your blogging model solely focuses on referrals from search engines, what happens to you if your rankings were to plummet or simply disappear? This is something you should consider as it happens more often than you may think.
Maybe you inadvertently do something to your blog that angers the search engine gods. Maybe your blog gets hacked and some nefarious links are placed within your site that you are unaware of. Or maybe you link out to the wrong kind of site. The point is that it isn’t too hard for your site to be penalized by the search engines, with penalties ranging from reduced rankings to delisting.
It is a horrible situation when your site is delisted from Google through no fault on your part. Getting back in to Google’s good graces can take a long time, even after requesting reconsideration.
The road to recovery can be long and grueling
I was hired a year ago by a wholesale sunglasses company that wanted to improve their search engine rankings. They had previously tried to save a few bucks by outsourcing their SEO needs to an unknown individual from a foreign country. Shortly after this individual started working for them, their site vanished from Google under their main keyword “wholesale sunglasses”.
I came into the picture 6 months after the penalties were imposed. Among other things, I cleaned up the code on their website and removed all the blackhat techniques my predecessor used. I then contacted Google and requested reconsideration for their website.
After requesting reconsideration it took several months before Google relented with their penalty and my client’s site once again appeared in the search listings, however they were listed lower than where they were previously ranked. Today they are ranked where they used to be, but it took nearly a year and a half to get back to that point. Could you last this long with your site being invisible in the search engines?
The good guys aren’t always safe
Even if you don’t do anything wrong, your site can arbitrarily drop in the rankings and your traffic will suffer. It has happened multiple times to even some of the best blogs. That’s why it is important to not put all your eggs in one basket and diversify how you drive traffic to your website.
It’s always better to implement a plan of diversity now when the sun is shining than to wait for a rainy day to begin. Are you doing anything to help drive traffic to your blog, such as promoting it with social media, newsletters or email marketing? If not, there’s no better time than the present!
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