Hi; I am hate hearing from webmasters questions like "Why my positions dropped in 1 day?" or "I have lost x visitors in 1 day?" . Most of them believe that their website was punished for something but mostly their web site did not punished when their serp point has dropped. In most cases, positions drop happen because Google change algoritm and change values of links, pagerank, content, and other factors. It mean, that google never punished your site, your site became a victim of changes which Google (or other search engine) maid to improve results. How to protect: Once you got good positions and traffic, you should go back and analyze how you promoted your site. For example. 1) You submitted your site in 500 or 1500 directories and wrote many articles. In this case you can drop if Google will decide to decrease value of directory links. In this case change your stategy and avoid future directories submission, get some links from forums, find bloggers to link your site, exchange some links, get highter pr links, find content links etc... 2) You bought many links from hight Pagerank sites and they mostly located in the footer, or with other sponsored links. You can drop if Google will decide to decrease pr value a little and concentrate on content and anchor. In this case, do some directories submission, article, forums, bloggers etc.... Remember... to avoid drops, you should have all types of links with different anchor from different sites. Thanks
Good stuff but I don't think it could really explain why in the past month my site has dropped 3 times from #3 to around 50 something and back again in a few days
Sometimes this is caused by backlinks from news sites and blogs. For example, the site in my sig would jump from the second page to #1 or #2 for a couple terms depending on whether or not a blog would link to it. While the linked in article was still on the front page, #1/#2 position, as it moved to the archive, #18-#20. I never really focused on it (Google only made up about 500 uniques/day or 5% of traffic), just noticed it while checking incoming visits in awstats. I'm guessing that something similar is happening for you ... Anita
But what if you did all of the above? It's usually hard to tell what causes anything. Analyze, Tweak, Wait, Analyze, Tweak, Wait, Repeat. . . forever.
No everything is not ok but I'm sure it will be within a day or two. I'm not confused just that the above doesn't really apply.
webmastes must not bother themselves if their position were gone in just 1 day. That's very normal to google and will come back again as long as you properly optimized the contents of your site and you're continuing your link building.
Personally, I feel that the fluctuation depends on the article submissions so far.. at least based on my personal experience.. My article often appear on the front page of most article directories and these helps a great deal in boosting my site to page 1 of Google query but when my article is moved to the archive, my ranking dropped (when the bots visit the article directories later).
Trich good post and based on SEO common sense about not putting all eggs in one basket. We all can loose focus when we decid to go for the dangling carrot or the fruit on the lowest branches. As usual your posts are always appreciated insightful and have value.
good information but i want to add some thing to it. Some time what happen our site's home page size increases and crawler take more time to crawl that page so it will run away it page more time to download. there are lots of small small factor affecting for ranking,some times we think that our back links are ok but some webmaster remove links without knowing us and by this way link count decreases which affect the ranking.
Is there a way to appeal on Google penalty? I have a myspace site that I am quite sure a penalty had been imposed. It used to be in 2nd page of a very competative myspace keyword "myspace layouts", but now it is on the 80th page.
Our site is experiencing a similar problem. It's very strange. Sometimes it will ranks second or third for a keyword and others it will rank at the very bottom as if it were penalized. I don't think it's penalized because we adhere to the Webmaster Guidelines, but why would it change so drastically and so often? It changes, usually, every other day.
Similar thing here, was #4 for "pimp myspace" for the longest time and now I'm page 7-8...I've experienced this before and the longest it's lasted was 2 weeks. I'm gonna give it another week or so before I really start panicking.