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If you haven't checked your Google listings lately and you had some really good ones then perhaps you shouldn't. Perhaps you should just forget about checking those listings for a couple of weeks because sometimes doing nothing is good. Ignorance can be, and is, bliss.

Of course, if you do have some good listings in Google ... and you haven't checked them in a week or two ... the very first thing you're going to do right now is rush off and check them. If you do then don't be surprised to find that the listings might have changed. It seems that Google had a little shuffle about a week ago and ... well ... you may not like what you see.

I know that we certainly didn't like what we saw when we checked the first page results for several of our clients websites. The search engine results pages for important terms that we had dominated for our clients had reverted to the listings of several months ago. Listings where our clients' sites didn't appear at all but instead were filled with sites that had scraped content from us.

Of course, if you find that you have the similar results you are allowed to feel frustrated. You are allowed to curse Google for being a fatherless sexual deviant, you're allowed to beat your head on your desk, throw things around the room, storm through the house calling down death and destruction on all those who want to scrap your content so that they rank better than you do but there is one thing that you are definitely not allowed to do.

You are not allowed to panic. Not even for a split second should panic enter your thoughts ... although it undoubtedly will. But don't let it take root, don't give in to panic and rush out and do stupid things to your sites. It's quite ok to rant and rave about the injustice of Google and the antecedents of scrapers but don't let it get under your skin and cause you to panic.

But why shouldn't you panic? Why shouldn't you run around in ever decreasing circles until you disappear up your own fundamental orifice? Why shouldn't you rush out and make fundamental changes to all those pages that no longer rank for anything that your clients want?

You shouldn't do any of those things because just as Google has done stupid things by listing rubbishy sites above yours Google will probably come along in a few weeks and correct the mess. When that happens your carefully crafted works of search engine optimization art will once again be restored to their rightful place.

Once again you will be able to proudly point to your ability to make your clients' sites rank for every term they've ever dreamed of and once again the world will be back in symmetry and the scrapers will be back in scraper hell.

But that's all weeks away in the future and, to be honest, it may not happen. Good does not always triumph over evil and Google, and its crappy algorithm, is just a dumb robot anyway so what do you do in the meantime?

As I said before, you don't panic. Instead you carry on with your development of those sites and pages that you want to rank well. You go on building content for those sites, you go on with your quality linking strategy and you go on doing all those things that got your pages to the top of the search engine results pages in the first place.

You go on doing those things because they worked and you go on doing those things because they will work again and again. You go on doing those things because, unless there is a fundamental change in Google's algorithm, they will always go on working.

The very last thing you should do is change your strategy ... unless of course your strategy was pretty crappy and you need to improve it. The last thing you should be doing is trying to compete with those poor quality sites by doing exactly what they're doing.

Ultimately if you want to consistently rank at the top of the search engine results pages for your chosen terms then you need quality content and quality links. You also need to understand that there will be a disturbance in the Force from time to time and Google will throw up some totally garbage results ... but it will settle down and if you are consistent with your strategy you sites will come back to their rightful place.

Just remember, when those disturbances do happen and your sites sink out of sight the last thing you should do is panic because the sky is definitely not falling.