Just recently, one of my sites took a major dip in search results. I hadn't done anything different, or bought any links to provoke the sudden loss of uniques...it was just as if Google decided to change up long tail search results for my page. The first day it occured, I thought..."Don't panic, Big G is making some changes, and everything will go back to normal." Second day, a slight panic set in. Uniques droped by 25%. Earnings dropped by 20%. Third day, total uniques had dropped 26% over last week on the same day. The Plan I began a small strategy to figure out what was happening. First: I searched high and low on SEO pages for a hint or something that would send up a red flag for me. I found nothing, but what was I going to find, because I hadn't done anything out of the oridnary to provoke the sudden change anyway. Second: Check for PHP errors and hosting problems. Result = 0 problems. Third: After being 4 days into the traffic decrease, I started to look at competitor sites and search results for old key terms I used to rank high for. Still couldn't put my finger on it. Fourth: After almost a week into the low search results, I decided to do a link swap with a competitor. The competitor had the same exact issue as well. After trading links, we both noticed that search results increased the following weeks afterward, and both sites are now back to performing where they were before the low search results. My question is, for SEO experts out there. How do you diagnose something like this. Is it all just guessing, or do you use somet type of formula to solve a problem like this? The SEO Rant The problem I see with SEO, is, there doesn't seem to be a quick or exact fix. Using a controlled expirement on your website with SEO seems to be next to impossible without having a mirrored site to compare to without the changes. SEO seems to be more of an art, than a science.