From N.3 to N.550 in 1 day. Why?

Hello,

I´ve been a reader of this forums for the last couple of months, and found many valuable advice about implementing
SEO to my web site and would like to thank all the people on it.
I´m writing because today something very strange happened to my results, I have a site that sells different shareware programs made by myself, until yesterday I was doing very well for 3 different programs on Google for 3 different keywords (every program has it´s own page).
For 1 keyword I was on top and still there, but for the other 2 programs my pages nearly vanished from the results (after doing well for months), in order to be clear I was number 3 for 1 keyword till yesterday, now I´m number 599.
For the second keyword I was number 4 yesterday and today I´m number 550.

Let me just add that in the last 4 weeks I made no change to the html code (no onsite optimization at all) and jumping 1 position up or down during the month (I made many directory submissions in January and February).

To me it looks like some sort of penaly, since all my competitor are still there, seems I´m the only 1 that dissapeared from the serps.

Does anybody has any idea of what could have cause this ?

thanks in advance

...what if everyone else did make changes and improved over your previous superior ranking stance? You vanish.

Start doing more.

ok,

but since the pages where stable for months, and then in 24 hours go from n.3 to n.599....seems to me there could be something more going on....
and anyway is true I haven´t been making onsite optimization for 4 weeks but incoming links where slowly improving every day...

I would give it a week before you start being extremely concerned. Search Engine flux can cause bizzarre drops like that once in a while. If you havent done anything you may well bounce back, but it never hurts to improve your relevancy in whatever way you can. maybe when you come back you'll be #1 instead of three

I think some updation might be going on in google.You can wait for sometime more before making any changes.

just an update.

The site never came back, the 2 pages that where doing well slipped to the end of the result (n.972 & n.961) after reading around I´m kind of sure I was hit with the -950 penalty (page at the end of results). The strange thing is that the page that was at n.1 is still there (somebody said this penalty doesn´t affect n.1 spots....)
What seems is that the index page lost all of it trust, and with it all my serp results, all but 1.
I made some changes to internal linking, and checking over duplicate content.

2 questions:
-in the first 8 days of May Googlebot gave me 272 hits and a massive 702 mb transfer, is this normal ? (other search bots have an average transfer of 2 mb)
-checkbot made 157 hits and 0 transfer, is this normal ?

What I'd like to add referring to what you said about submitting to directories ( in January / February ) and link developing generally is that I have observed that no matter how high you get your site at some point, don't stop getting good backlinks.

I had sites which were strong for several months but because of different reasons I didn't work as much as I should have on maintaining a good link developing process.

Althought I was still updating them pretty often, it happen to see them going BOOOM to nowhere at some points without apparently real reasons for that. After getting back to work and aquiring fresh backlinks, they were usually comming but in a few weeks.

Don't know if your case is the same, but it could be. So, the same "boring" advice as always: try to get fresh quality backlinks regularly.

Yep.. Seems strange to me. Some guesses

1) My first guess is the links you have were devalued. Thus the link juice you were getting from them dissapeared. If you say had one significant link devalued/removed this could have major effect. if many after the last change google seems to have devalued many links. (chck you links and see if something has changed)

2) You having been doing something black hat. Either knowingly or someone has been secretly using your site to do it. Ie hidden links to ault pages etc. (check you outlinks and see if any strange ones exist)

3) someone else on you server has been doing something black hat. Everyone on that server has been hit with a penalty. (check to see if other sites on your server host have also suddenly lost rankings)

4) you are the victum of some minor algo tweek that has seen the things which werepreviously working well for you stop working. This could be for example that something has lowered your trust rank enough to give you a 'sandbox' effect.

5) google bug and will fix itself

My money would be on lost significant link/s or you server has been penalized and you are innocent victum.

This is possible? I never heard of this before of course I have ben out of the game for six or seven months...

I don't see how it could effect you unless Google tied you with the guilty part somehow. For instance you link to them or exchange links with them. You also practice BH methods. except for that I see no way Google would penalize a whole or part of a server based on one sites activity.

I don't think so, unless like visio says, there is interlinking.

raz

manmac, you didn't say how long ago your site drooped. If it is recent, don't panic! Give it around a week and meanwhile continue some link building, add some content, improve internal linking and stuff like that, without getting carried away... No major drastic changes.

raz

thanks for all replies.

the site dropped from the serps on the 27 of april.
The site has no black hat, the site was not hacked (well doesn´t appear).

In the space of 48 hours gone from top 5 positions to 950+ for all terms bar 1

manmac, I agree with the previous advice about waiting a bit before you react too strongly.

I've read many posts on this blog the last few months where people say "my site just plummeted to the bottom". Yikes! It finally happened to my company site as well about two weeks ago - we disappeared completely. Prior we reliably ranked between 4 - 6 on Google for our main keyword - then nothing! After 4 days, we reappeared at number 13, and now are back up to number 8.

When you job is on the line for this stuff, it aint no fun at all for sure...

Hang in there.

Ditto the not worrying just yet thought. My site disappeared for a certain keyword for about a week, recently (not found in the top 100). When I came back, I was at #2 rather than #3. Someone posted a while back, a url to check future rank in the various Google datacenters (not page rank). Wish I'd bookmarked it, but it did ring true for me last time this happened with my site.

I do have a question for gazzahk regarding this:


is this really possible? I understand PR may be greatly effected, but serps? I have yet to find links to be that powerful that they affect my site's positions. PR, yes.. rank, no
Then again, maybe it has something to do with the age of the site or history in Google? I just know I have yet to see anything remotely true to this statement.