Have you ever gone on a streak where every single change you made on a website resulted in a rankings drop?

[JoeyJoeJoeJoestar]

I just got fired this morning because I went on a crazy month-long losing streak and I have no idea why.

A month ago, I got a new job at a small agency that specializes in a specific type of small service area business. This was a godsend, because I got laid off from my previous job at the end of July.

Things started out well, but as soon as I started actually working on the websites, it went to hell. Every time I made a change on one of our sites that I thought would be beneficial for SEO and UX, the rankings for our money keywords slipped immediately. It was like I was cursed. I would touch a website, and the rankings would go south. Every single time. (On one website, the rankings went down on every page I worked on, but the two pages I didn't work on jumped from page 3 to ranking in the top 5 on page 1. A cruel twist.) I've never had anything like this happen before in the entire 10 years I've been doing SEO. It felt like the algorithm was being updated in real time specifically to spite me.

This morning, I couldn't log in to my accounts, so I called my boss. She told me she was letting me go because I was killing her websites and she couldn't afford to lose business because they're a small start up agency. The thing that really stings is that I couldn't argue with her. The numbers don't lie. I completely failed at the task I was hired to do.

Has anyone else here ever gone on a losing streak like this? Where all of a sudden every site you touched just went to shit and it wasn't at all clear why?

My confidence is gone. I have no idea what to do from here. I've been doing this for 10 years and this month makes me feel like it was all a waste of time because I couldn't get a positive result for the life of me. I'm at the point where I don't even think I want to do SEO anymore, but I don't know what else I would do because this is the only real career I've ever had.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Sorry to hear that JoeyJoeJoeJoestar! There have been a handful of significant algorithm updates lately so maybe that had something to do with it.

 

[Conor Treacy]

I really think this could have been more of a bad timing situation than something that you had done directly. Unfortunately, rankings move up and down and while they may have slipped this week, next week they could jump 20 spots.

For your own sanity, keep an eye on the website you were working on and see if their rankings pop back. That'll help put the confidence back in your step.

Over the years we've touched hundreds of sites and thousands of pages. Not all result in a positive movement for the specific thing we're targeting, but it does move the needle for a different set of phrases. There's no way around it other than to keep an eye on things. If you did everything by the book, you can rest easy that you followed what should work and it was likely just bad timing with an update.