Question

Do you all agree with John stating that link ad content not being the blame for decline in rankings? He gave 5 other reasons like ecosystem changes, and I don't know what that mean, along with some other reasons.  
https://www-searchenginejournal-com...36%2F

Answer 1

What he says aligns with something I wrote about over a decade ago. I call it the Theorem of Four SEO Influences. There are four reasons for why your search engine rankings change: 1) You do something with your site 2) Someone else does something with their site 3) The search engines do something with their data 4) People search for something different Everything that happens in a search system is influenced by these four input channels or vectors. A change in any of these influences can alter the search results, and all four change constantly.  

Comments

@narcotize Will adding or deleting posts cause it? Do you have a link to your article? I would think if there is still good content on there and strong links, that this shouldn't happen.  

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@chew446 It's a theoretical article. You can search for "theorem of four seo influences" on Bing or Google and you'll find it but my point really is that you can't control what the search results are going to look like. The searchable Web ecosystem is a dynamic, constantly changing system. No one is guaranteed to stay on top of any query forever. There's no single universal reason why sites lose position in search results. Technically at the algorithmic level your pages lack the signals or signal strength they need to maintain dominance. But no one knows what these signals are, how they are measured, or how the search engines decide to weight them.  

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@narcotize If becomes so stressful playing this cat and mouse game.  

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@chew446 Don't think of it as a cat and mouse game. Don't concentrate on a small set of queries. You want to be found for a much larger set of queries than you visualize. People have an amazing gift for searching for things in unexpected ways, and many times they change their queries to avoid the artificially ranked stuff that marketer believe should rank on top.  

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@narcotize Ummmm, that's a good way at looking at it.  

Answer 2

In our niche it is more like Google shifts everything around to keep you guessing. They turn up relevance or links or interlinking or whatever. Cynically I think it is just a deliberate attempt to thwart SEO.  

Comments

@ragen I have been thinking this for awhile.  

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@ragen we have proven randomness where the only change was at google. (Or possibly users).  

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@donaghue6 it explains everything that John m said. there is nothing you can do about it because they keep on altering the signals. So what he says is actually correct. In order to realign your site with a new signal you would have to change many legacy SEO items.  

Answer 3

Good google is doing this: The same evolution everything in life is going through. Like when you were young you loved skittles and M&Ms and now as an adult i am not so keen on sugar as i was as a kid and a teenager. Also peoples choices change, and content can become outdated; SEO 2003 (when i started was free money machine) and now SEO 2020 isnt that fun anymore and thus a guide created 17 years ago is less relevant

Comments

@darien right

Answer 4

Rightt ecosystem changes yet Amazon Wayfair Overstock etc are always on top

Comments

@mckenna907 right

Answer 5

Having done a few "gradual drops" site recoveries, I'm convinced this is wrong.  

Answer 6

Entropy always increases, especially when helped. This is the first law of google dynamics.