In the Matt Cutts's blog entry http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/bigdaddy/ he states that a data refresh took place across all datacenters on Dec 27th. On the 27th traffic for an affiliate store I have took a complete nosedive, down 90%. My affiliate store is part of a larger site containing forums and blogs. Searches that I used to show up for now show the big authories e.g. bizrate, ebay, nextag etc... followed by poor results which are not at all relevant to the search phrase used. I appear much further down the rankings even though the search phrase appears in the title of my page and the H1 tag. Results higher then my site may contain the words of the search phrase but usually they are dotted around the page. I am also seeing raw affiliate urls in SERPs and the usual spammy redirects and keyword stuffing. Did anybody experience a substantial shift in rankings on the 27th Dec? Are you seeing the kind of SERPs I am seeing? This is driving me nuts because there seems to be little to no discussion about this on any of the forums.
don't think it will help you much, but have a look at this thread, I was watching changes late dec. 27, it was my birthday http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=46984
hi seo-ireland. glad to read your post. the same hapend to me with an affiliate site. it is an 1 year old ringtones site and I had very good positions in serps, for romanian, spanish, portuguese, english... keywords. besides I felt from first page to nowhere for the most keyphrases, i am frustrated because the sites that appear now on the first page in google serps are not relevant. for example for one portuguese keyphrase with 200K results, i see one site with 2 ibls, one with 8 ibls, one is with poetries... and this is on the first page! there are also many sites without the keywords in title or description... this reminds me of msn, 2-3 months ago, when they had problems or whatever they did. luckily that was temporarily. i don't now what represents 90% for you, but i had 700 visitors/day from SE and now, exactly from 27th, i have only 200. hope is temporarily
Hi lixor, I had on average 600 visitors/day before the 27th and average 60 visitors/day now. It is quite interesting that you had an affiliate site that was affected. I wonder if it was an affiliate site centered flux/refresh/mini-update? Any other members running affiliate sites who can confirm a rankings slip? I'm not worried though. My thinking is that there may be a few filters that have been turned off over at Google and some of the crap is rising to the top as a result. Lixor, get back in touch if you see any changes.