Vast Rank – Google SERP Drop and Return

Back in October I saw a large drop in Vast Rank’s Google SERP.  In other words, when people searched for certain terms where a Vast Rank page (normally a college profile) would appear on the first Google search result page for a few weeks, these same searches yielded the same Vast Rank college profile page to show up many pages into the Google search results.

At the time I was worried because I was unsure of what would happen next.  This was the first time I really cared about SEO.  When I worked at barnesandnoble.com, people would just show up and pump millions of dollars of products through my code a day.  It was magic, and I thought, dam I am good!  Well, the reality is they have a brand, and I do not!

If your site does not appear in Google Search results, it is pretty much death to your site if you depend on organic traffic.  Google matters much less if you have a website that people have to use for their school, job, bank account or whatever.  But when you depend on organic traffic, you rely on Google.

If your site drops in SERP, the Google webmaster tools do not tell you in general about any penalties on your site.  I imagine that this is so that crafty little SEO experts can not reverse engineer some of Google’s algorithms.  So during these times of doom and gloom for your site, you are pretty much left to looking at SEO discussion sites and the Google Webmaster Help discussion group.

Luckily, Vast Rank returned to Google’s search results after a huge drop from October 26th, 2008 – November 5th, 2008.  I am posting this to show other webmasters that there is hope if your new site suddenly disappears from Google search results.   So take a deep breath, the world is not ending, and wait it out! I’m serious,  take a deep breathe, and count 1000-1, 1000-2, 1000-3. Now Exhale.  Calm yet?  If not, go here, or keep reading, I have proof that there is hope.

Below is a screen screen shot from Vast Rank’s Google Analytics page.  The screen shot shows traffic from launch day until today (notice the huge drop in traffic in October-November).

I updated quite a few things on Vast Rank during the downtime period: accurate sitemap last mod dates, unique title tags, better meta descriptions, etc.  Some of these items were called out in the Google Webmaster Tools for Vast Rank, and other items were just common sense items that I needed to get to implementing (i.e. accurate last mod dates in the xml sitemap).  However, I think the biggest reason I saw the huge drop was that Vast Rank was so new. 

If you are a webmaster experiencing SERP drops, it would be great for you to post a comment so we can collectively share our experiences!

iPhone Development, a bad use of time for a .NET Developer?

OK, so even though I’m a “.NET Developer”, I’m really not just a “.NET Developer”, but at this point it is the technology stack that pays the bills around here, so lets just keep it at that for the sake of this post.

Recently I bought a refurbished MacBook Pro, that had all of the upgrades for the Feb 2008 Rev. (7200 RPM Drive, 2.6 Ghz Intel Peryn Dual Core, 6MB L2 Cache, 512 MB Video RAM, etc).  My main use for this machine currently is for all of my personal software including Cubase SX 4.5 (an audio sequencer), loads of VST plugins, samples, pictures, videos, etc.  In addition to running those apps, I can now run the iPhone SDK.

I have quite a few software product ideas right now, and some of them are iPhone apps, some of them are web based, and some are some cross platform desktop app ideas. 

So without thinking logically about any of this, I started digging through the iPhone SDK and Developer Videos.  I gave myself all kinds of reasons that this would be an ok use of my time, like “hey learning other languages makes you a better developer”, “hey seeing other architectures is good too”, “oh, I consider myself a software designer because I create applications that are well designed that people want to use so maybe I should learn more about Apple”, “ “this iPhone market doesn’t really seem too saturated, and I bet I could compete with a lot of leading apps”, on, and on, and on.

Then reality kicked in and I said to myself, WTF am I doing here?  I’m going to spend my time managing memory in Objective C? I’m going to create an app that sells for a couple bucks and then hope that it sells how many apps to be somewhat profitable? Hmm, umm, and what can I use this Objective C experience for the next time I’m deep in ASP.net, WPF, javascript or CSS?

So I went from one extreme to the other and now I’m kind of sitting in this nice little pocket of gray where there is no clear answer.  I figure I’m just going to finish up some web oriented features that I want to get out onto Vast Rank (internationalization is coming!), and kind of poke around with Cocoa, UIKit, Objective-C, and XTools for fun on the side.  After I play around with the SDK for a little bit, I can see if I want to commit to taking on some of the iPhone app ideas I have.

Are you a .NET or Java developer considering developing an iPhone app?  Do you think it is a good use of your time, if your app does not take off?  I’m still on the fence right now.