Today I admit to being pretty satisfied with my own work. I started a new project at the end of March with the pure intention to rank #1 on Google for specific (money-making-related) keyword phrases. I built the website, populated it with good, unique content that I wrote myself, and went to work with the off-page search engine optimization.

I was content with my initial success because I worked my way up first #9, then up step-by-step until I reached #4. I seemed to hit an invisible barrier at #4 for a while, but I continued casually working the way you should (the white hat SEO way) but was disappointed near the end of May when my website completely disappeared from the search results.

At first I was totally p*ssed, but it wasn’t the first time this had happened, so I was like “must be the sandbox, or the panda, or the penguin” or any other vaguely named system Google has implemented to impede the ability of professional SEOs to obtain results.

1) Patience. This was key, you can never lose your head when obstacles appear.

2) Adapt. Don’t desperately go off machine-gunning different strategies in every direction, do a conscious re-evaluation of your SYSTEM and make minor modifications that are sure to improve it. In this case, I removed a large number of backlinks to the website which might appear to be ‘spammy’ for a small, new website. NO reconsideration request was sent to Google.

3) MORE patience. Things take a while to go into effect. Trying to rush results usually slows it down more than it helps. It’s like the guys who jump into the safety lane on the freeway during a traffic jam to try and bypass all the stopped cars. A highway patrol officer often catches you, fines you, and you get slowed down much more than if you had simply been patient and waited for the results to happen naturally.

These activities were enough, because this week Google restored my website back into the rankings, and instead of coming back at #4, I came back at #1.

SUCCESS!