That all changed last Thursday however when Google suddenly decided that my little experiment site was far more valuable than it had previously thought. Yup, Google decided that instead of listing my site way down rankings for one or two low-level keywords, it would index site at top of rankings (quite literally in first place in many instances) for numerous high-level keywords! :-)

Result? The site has gone from receiving an average of 35 visitors a day from Google to receiving over 500 visitors per day. On busiest day this week, Google kindly sent site just under 800 visitors.

Of course, this is great news and site is already making considerably more profit than it has ever done but just look at how I would have missed out if I had taken site offline. Remember, this is a site that I have barely touched in three years and I certainly haven't spent any time optimizing site for search engines. It is just a simple case of Google changing their algorithm in a way that favours my site considerably. This is one of those situations which could happen to any website at any time and this is main reason why I say, once you have a site online, leave it there.

Clearly there is no guarantee that my site is going to stay at top of Google for any length of time and given my experience of how search engines work, I am prepared for it to drop back down index at any time but I am certainly enjoying extra traffic while it lasts.

The above situation also illustrates how fickle search engines can be. Longer term readers will remember that I took decision not to bother chasing search engine rankings some time ago. This decision was taken after Google decided to move one of my highly optimized sites from top position for countless keywords to about 20th position. This was a site which I had spent weeks optimizing and a site which had held top positions for over two years. Traffic to this site dropped away in hours and that was point at which I vowed not to waste my time chasing search engine rankings and instead, would just let search engines sort themselves out and rank my sites as they saw fit.

Sometimes this approach works and sometimes it doesn't - I try not to let it worry me either way.....

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