Recently, I noticed an alarming anomaly on Google: sites occasionally drop off the face of the keyword phrase planet, disappearing into what I refer to as the ‘SEO void’, which is somewhere between the SEO sandbox and a bottomless pit. This doesn’t happen for a single keyword phrase, but for all keyword phrases.
At first I thought I had been penalized for overoptimizing my site and, after furiously searching for remedies to this problem, I accepted the fact that I would have to tell my client that I had somehow destroyed their presence on the internet. As I was not looking forward to this conversation, I procrastinated several days, telling myself that there was a glitch in Google’s system and the site would return to its previous rank. I waited several days and, lo and behold, on the third day the site returned to the SERPs at a higher position than previously listed.
This happened yet again with another client with similar results. Somewhat more composed this time, I waited several days and once again found that my site returned to the SERPs with higher rankings.
I don’t know why this happens, as it occurred in both instances between crawls. I do know, however, that the only solution is to wait it out.
