Keyword Rankings Dropping Like Crazy

[SunAndGames]

A whole lot of my keywords are dropping like crazy, and I'm not sure why. It seemed to start yesterday. I pretty new to all this, so I was hoping someone could shed some light on it. My site is www.sunandgames.com and I've really only started driving traffic to it this month. I've had the domain for a few years, but never really did much with it until recently.

For the first 2 or 3 weeks of this month, my traffic has been growing, and was doing about 1000 visitors per day. Until yesterday. Most of my pages are creating using an XML data feed from SearchFeed. Suddenly yesterday it dropped to 700 visitors. I think today may be even worse. I thought maybe it was probably just a blip, but still started checking around. I've noticed in keyword tracker, that about 70-80% percent of my keywords were dropping 10, 20, 30 positions and more. I'm tracking about 225 keyword phrases.

The bulk of my traffic has been from Google, and I'm not sure why they would be ranking me lower all of a sudden. My PR has been a 2 for a while, and hasn't changed. They list me as having about 4500 pages, which I know is wrong. Google keeps reporting my page count totally wrong. They jumped from about 500 pages to 4500 pages last week in one day, when I know I only had about 1500 built at the time. Yesterday they said I had 1300 pages, but today they seem to be back to 4500 or so. I'm not sure if that has anything do with my keyword rankings dropping or not, as this is all pretty new to me.

Any suggestions . . . opionions ??? I'm kinda bewildered at the moment.

Thanks, Chris

[dazzlindonna]

Google has been running different sets of algos (2 or 3 usually) for the last couple of months. Yesterday, one set has begun taking over most of the datacenters. If your good rankings were in a different set, those are history (for the time being at least). The different algos have been jumping around like crazy over the last 2 months, with some becoming the dominant set at some times, and others at other times. So, tomorrow, or the next day or whenever, a different algo (possibly the one you rank well in) could be the one take over.

[justtara]

Same thing happened to me but for only one specific page on my site. I had been between 1 and 5 for spefic keyword for well over a year. Now this page isn't even indexed. Then today the keyword track said I was at 4 for a similar keyword. When I went to check it on google itself it's wasn't there.

I think google has ADD.

[SunAndGames]

Google has been running different sets of algos (2 or 3 usually) for the last couple of months.

Interesting. Why would they do something like that? Are they testing out new beta algos, getting ready for an new algo release? Or do they just rotate different algos to see if search results improve?

I wonder if that's why Google keeps changing the number of pages it thinks I have to crazy amounts.

[dazzlindonna]

Your guesses are as good as ours. :)

[SunAndGames]

Yea, I figured I'd get an answer like that :D . I guess I'll just carry on. More sites. More pages . . .

[nightmare5liter]

I too have recently suffered a large drop in rankings. Actually 90% of my traffic was from google. Traffic has been dropping by about 50% per day since march 18th 2005. I didn't make any major changes to the page. Yes I'm kinda new at this but was lucky enough to get some decent rankings at first for a rookie I was thrilled to get 60-80 hits a day consistantly for the last few months and now its dropped.

[SunAndGames]

Dropping since Mar 18th. Wow, that's brutal. How do people here deal with this kind of stuff? What actions can you take to combat this sort of downturn? All I can think to do is to keep building more sites and pages. Maybe use different approaches, that hopefully won't get hammered so bad?

[www.AmCy.org]

People--and I mean your average Internet users--are going to get fed up with the erratic g00gle SERP's sooner or later. If G doesn't stabilize their SERP's soon then I predict that Yahoo! Search will beat G in popularity by 2007. The Yahoo! SERP's keep getting better and better (more relevant) and the G SERP's keep getting worse, probably due to their efforts to thwart all the various SEO techniques out there.

For now, I would optimize for both G and Yahoo!

AmCy

[Infiniterb]

I agree that most users will be fed up. As an example, say I search for something and I don't recall the link. Normally, I would just go back to google and type in the same search term. But this second time I go to search for that link, it's magically gone. There's no way for me to remember aside of going back into my history and looking through all the sites I had visited that day. And what if I delete my history? Good luck finding the site I am looking for.