Don't panic the very same thing happened last week to me for one of my main keywords. Dropped several hundred spots and within a week they came back ranked higher than they ever have before. I did notice some of the usseual suspects disappeared from the serps and some spammy results crept in like some amazon and dealtime pages.
One of my sites just dropped from ~20k visitors/day to ~5k visitors/day. Something appears to be going on.
I don't think that kind of lawsuit would fly. Google provides its indexing and search service for free (while Yahoo charges several hundred for inclusion in its index). Whatever we think of them, Google could very convincingly argue that they've gained their 'dominance' through nothing other than choices made by web searchers, and not by any market-cornering actions. That being said, I agree with you that just including YPN on a site probably doesn't account for a drop in rankings. Plenty of webmasters with good SEOd sites have replaced AdSense with various affiliate ads without being slammed. I'd check out the sites that leapfrogged you and see if there's any common type of content that helped them jump in the rankings. Maybe also see if any of your inbound links come from potentially 'bad neighborhoods.' There seems to be a lot of chatter that IBLs from link farms or poorly themed directories are not a good thing these days.
There's no way google is taking YPN ads into account in their SERPS. I mean who do you think they are, microsoft?
There is definitely something going on though. The official travel website for my state has been number 1 forever, as it probably should be (for the search term "visit montana"). It's been around forever and is a PR7. Currently it's not anywhere to be found on the first 5 pages I checked. To me, this looks very similiar to Jaguar, at least what I'm seeing for some terms I watch closely.
Same thing is happening to us. Been ranked #1-#5 for specific terms for 6+ months, now nowhere to be found. This is happening on both old and new pages. For us, this started yesterday afternoon. Everything virtually disappeared from the SERPS although our total number of indexed pages has gone WAY up over the past few days. My guess is that its a temporary thing until they get settled down. The thing with G lately though is that they just never seem to settle down...
It's been acknowledged that there's been a bit of a "rollback" due to the recent "mega spam" episode. In part I suspect this is what's being noticed. I'd try checking several DC's and see what they look like. Additionally, there's been a lot of webmasters and site owners reporting large drops and large gains in the number of pages indexed. Each page lost is a loss of links and each one gained is additional links, both of which are going to affect rankings. Dave
I also noticed a drop in traffic yesterday. I used to get 400+ referrers from google each day. Today down to just about none. Hopefully things will improve.
After reading this post pretty much for the past few hours, looking for a glimmer of hope, I went and checked my SERPs as well...and I got my rear end handed too me by Google...Funny little bunch of crack heads . Hopefully things will be sorted out soon enough...though I'm not going to hold my breath.
Hi guys I'm experiencing the same problem. 400+ visitors a day today less than 30. I hope it's not the co-op being penalised
Based on my raw-logs, everything is about normal for me - but i cant tell for sure because Analytics has been down since midnight.. Man.. Bad serps Analytics down GooglePack Referrals showing up as Firefox Referrals .. Google is having a bad day today!
Guys, I just put 2 and 2 together. Before the summer started, my sites were getting 100,000 hits a day. I recently got accepted into YPN, and I put all of the ads up. For some reason, I am getting less than 4,000 hits a day now. I still have the same pagerank, and I still have the same alexa. I cant even find my site in google anymore... I use to be on the top 5 of a high keyword, now I am no where to be seen, even if I put www.mysite.com, I dont even show up! wtf is happening between google and yahoo?! Just remember, my site isnt even showing up in google if I type in "www.mysite.com" or "mysite.com"
Sounds like you dont have the same problem as everyone else here - sounds like you've been DROPPED (IE; Banned) ?
What are talking about? If the guy is typing in his url in the Google search box, and nothing is coming up, then yeah, he's banned. It has nothing to do with being harsh, it has to do with what being banned by Google means. -Michael
ok.. maybe not 'banned', but obviously, DEindexed. If Google is doing a rollback of some sort, it's probably just temporary..
A rollback doesn't make sense for me, as it has been a long time since my punished site had SERPS as lousy as it has today.
google is probably fixing their stuff due to the buzz about the spam domains, next time keep your mouth shut guys otherwise G will just make their filters more strict.