by Jonathan Marshall Many small businesses owners keep a much more watchful eye on their search engine rankings when compared to larger companies. Search engine rankings can change for one of several hundred reasons. Your site may gain or lose rankings on a daily bases due to algorithm changes, a dropped or added link, or a site is added or removed from the search engine's index. Some ranking changes can be traced to a particular event while others occur for seemingly no reason at all. Basically rankings change because change happens, and that's that. But understanding what causes typical loss of rankings can give us a better insight into sea of search engine ranking fluctuations. This insight can help you prevent serious long-term effects caused by a sudden drop in search engine rankings.

While we can never prevent all losses of search engine rankings, understanding the reasons why changes occur can, at least, help you make your presence in search results more stable. Reasons for ranking changes can be boiled down to three basic events: 1) Your site changes, 2) a competitor's site change, or 3) the search engine algorithm changes. Or it could be any combination of the three. Let's look at each individually. (How to) Deal With Changes Made to Your Website On site changes.To keep current most businesses must make frequent changes to their websites. This could be a matter of adding new products, removing old products, changing pricing, publishing a blog post, removing out-dated information, adding current information or even something as significant as a total site re-design. While minor maintenance edits are necessary to make your site better for your visitors, if improperly executed they can have a severely negative effect on your rankings. In most cases small, routine changes will have a minimal effect whatsoever.

You'll likely see minor fluctuations in your search engine rankings depending on what was changed and on which page. But in some cases, even small changes can have a profound impact. When it comes to keyword, or other more significant site changes, you need to proceed carefully and consider the impact any of your planned changes may have. Things such as changing title tags, re-writing content, moving or deleting pages, full site re-designs, or site architecture changes can really screw with your rankings if care is not taken. (How to) Deal With It: Don't make drastic site changes unless its absolutely warranted. And if you do, be sure to consult with an SEO professional. Big site changes don't have to hurt as bad as they often do. Your SEO can help you ensure the process is as easy on your rankings as possible. When making smaller changes, be sure your changes carefully consider your rankings and optimization efforts already in place. Don't make unsure changes because it will affect the engines without consulting a search engine marketing professional.