Google is Weird

Sometimes I just can’t understand Google. We’re kind of in a love/hate relationship. Sometimes it loves me and brings piles of traffic to my lenses, sometimes it hates me and drops my lenses completely and they are nowhere to be found.

For instance, one lens of mine was getting between 150 to 200 visitors a DAY, and was ranking on the first page for Google search results. Then suddenly it died completely for about a week. I couldn’t find it anywhere no matter how hard I tried. So, to put it mildly, I panicked just a little bit because this was one of my top performing lenses.

And suddenly, just as it died, the lens was reborn again and began receiving regular traffic again. Weird. Other lenses have gone through the same phenomenon, though on a much smaller scale because they don’t get as much traffic overall, but most of them have gone through this phase.

After doing some research, I discovered that what Google does is it places a newly-discovered site (lens) high up in the search results for a “test run”, just to see how well the site performs, how much it’s visited, etc. If the site does well, it gets rewarded by Google with a good ranking, but if not, then it basically gets shoved back to the end of the line. In my case, the lens was fairly popular and was doing well, so it got its ranking restored.

Google seems to like it when lenses get lots of backlinks, too, and I think that the “Google New Lens Effect” is lessened when new, relevant backlinks are frequently added to lenses. You can never have enough relevant backlinks to your lenses as far as Google is concerned. Google is also good friends with Father Time, and when lenses get older Google tends to treat them better. I’ve had lenses that were long dead and forgotten for a few months, but suddenly were resurrected and started getting great traffic from Google.

Time and backlinks are the salvation for new lenses I guess. Google, I love/hate you.