Any time my rankings go up or down

[FONT=&quot]People’s thoughts: Any time my rankings go up or down, I should assume that it's the result of some change I made. Even better, if my rankings drop I should assume that someone at Google manually looked at my site and penalized it.

FACT: It's nearly impossible to discern cause and effect in the search engines. Webmasters new to search rankings are usually quick to ascribe a change in position to some recent change on their site. Maybe that's accurate, but maybe it's not -- and I'm tempted to say that it's probably not. A change in position could be the result of a completely different change you made to your site three months ago that you forgot about. Or it could be the result of changes competitors made to their sites. Or it could be that the engines changed their algorithm and the changes on your site had nothing to do with it. In the end, it's nearly impossible to correlate changes on your site with changes to your ranking. So what's the strategy here? Simple: Don't worry about it. Focus on creating the best site you can: the general things, not the specific ones.

It's tempting to think that a change in your rankings was the result of some change you made, but it's just as likely to be coincidence. It could be the result of an algorithm change or competing sites doing things that caused them to rank better. Google doesn't have the resources or the inclination to police the billions and billions of pages on the Internet. Humans at the search engine are not personally monitoring your website; your website is not that important.

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