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Remember that famous line from the television version of Mission Impossible about loving it when a plan comes together? Well I've just got to say that now but with one slight difference.

Earlier this month we were approached by a local business to build a website for them and the site was completed last week. Today the business owner signed off on it and then told me that the site had already generated its first lead. Somebody in an adjoining town had found the website and contacted the business to make a purchase.

Now you can't ask for much better than that if you're a business owner and it certainly does no harm to our reputation as web designers. I mean, how can you beat producing a site that's at the top of Google for the chosen search terms even before the site has been formally launched?

And therein is the mystery of this website because it's a plan that has come together without us having completed the last part of the plan. Normally when we build a website for a client it's built offline and doesn't get uploaded until the client has signed off on the completed project. Because we work with local clients we can show them the developing site whenever we need to without actually having it up on the Web however this time, for various reasons, we did build it online but we never linked to it from any of our sites.

Uploading and linking is usually the last step and that comes after the final payment is made yet somehow today the site was appearing in Google and, according to Google's cache, the index page was cached seven days ago and one of the other pages was cached even before that.

The other interesting factor here was the position that it was holding on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). I doubt that it will stay there but for now it's appearing at the top of the page for all the search terms that are relevant for the client's business and that's interesting because it was really only lightly optimized. The main purpose of the website was to act as an online brochure to supplement some other marketing the client wanted to do in other media.

But still there is that fundamental question; how did Google find it when we didn't link to it?

I certainly do love it when a plan comes together but I sure wish I knew how the plan had managed to come together this time.

At the same time as I'm extremely happy that we've been able to work what amounts to a miracle for a client I'm more than a little unhappy that our own business website has sunk to page nine in the SERPS for an important term. Before the most recent major Google update we were on page one but I'm not about to panic.

Instead we'll spend a little time over the weekend tweaking some of the text - something we had planned to do even before these changes happened; we'll look at developing some more links from sites that really matter and we'll then sit back and wait and see what happens. It would be quite easy to run around in ever decreasing circles and make wholesale changes to the site but that's not what's needed here. It is optimized for the search term we're interested in ... but not heavily ... and we have never gone mad with links from sites that are going to pass little if any value with their links so we expect to see it return to page one in due course.

It is interesting though to look at the sites listed ahead of us for that search term because some of them are sites that we have built for locals and they're ranking better for our search term than we are. While some might see that as a sign that we really do need a complete revamp of the site with even more optimisation for the term we're chasing we see it as quite the opposite.

I guess only time will tell.

There's no doubt that search engines can do strange things with their listings from time to time but much of it is temporary and things often do settle back into their normal pattern sooner or later. Sometimes it can take a month or two for things to return to the way they were while at other times things can settle down in a week or two.

You can never be too sure how long it will take but the trick is not to panic and to allow some time for things to return to normal. If they don't then perhaps it's time to make some changes but that should be the last resort for anyone who has lost rankings in important SERPS.