A site I did for a customer last June was on p1 or p2 for certain keywords but has now suddenly fallen to p8. I have not changed this site recently and have not been building any backlinks to it - only 1 Squidoo link in recent months. Is is likely the site has been sandboxed at this late stage? What is the best way of getting the site back? Is it just a matter of waiting amonth or two or would a few ezine articles help?
im from bury st edmunds!! maybe google just doesnt view the site to be worthy of first place, maybe you should have built links to keep on the 1st page
all the new sites going up from the start, and then the situation is going to be normal. Have to work more to get him on first pages
Getting a page 1 position never entitles anyone to keep it; your competition will be vying with you, the Caffeine update has kicked in and you need to keep working to keep the site up-to-date and earning quality, reputable incoming links. A nice steady spread & build of social media links always helps (twitter is my own personal favourite)
I think may be due to caffeine update is running on Google major update in SERP i seen more fluctuation in Ranking of Sites!!
You need to keep your site updated and get more backlinks, this way your site will be better ranked in the search engines.
may be your tool problem try to use another tool to check the pr my tool usually display wrong stats to me
The Google Caffiene update may be what had affected the rankings. Look at server speed of the website and page load times, this has become much more important and is now a significantly weighted factor. I have updated some previous clients to ensure they conform to this section of the algorithm.
I would agree that this is most likely caused by the Google Caffeine update. But don't rule out the possiblility that your competition reported your site. If you have taken any shortcuts, ie. not adhered to the Google Guidelines than you are open to this. I've gottent sites knocked from the 1st page to the very back of the bus because of blatant violations.
There's been NO black hat SEO whatsoever. Not even anything close. The site needs more links, I'm aware of that and have drafted a second email to suggest to the customer how he should build some - but my main query is why it has fallen so far (p1/2 to p8) within a couple of weeks? Also, would a few ezine articles or other reasonable non-spammy links do any good? I did have another site (also created last summer) which in November fell from p2 to p8 for a few weeks and bounced back a few weeks later so was wondering if this type of pattern is common??????
you pretty much answered your own question. no update has been done in months and no backlinks have been built recently either. to maintain your current ranking and/or to advance, you will need to have some activity going on. not updating the site is ok but sometimes updating the site helps as googlebot knows that you update the site on a regular basis which makes the googlebot come back on a regular basis for the fresh content. but keep building backlinks is an absolute necessity if you want to maintain your ranking. you stop building links, you fall behind in few months
It is normal to see fluctuations in ranking during the first few months of the website. It may not be due to sandbox, it may just be fluctuation in search engine results/positions.
That's because, the competitive websites have tried optmizing more than yours, SEO is a process which neer ends