This was one of the most frustrating weekends of my life. My site has been penalized since November for something very simple. (too many link trades) The problem was fixed. Re-inclusion requests have been filed admitting my mistake. Saturday night at 6pm PST, everything came back to normal. All serps from pre-penalty were there. Shortly after the Super Bowl, approximately 24 hours after they showed up - they vanished again and the results are identical to the penalty results I've seen for the last 2.5 months. During this 24 hour window, all data centers showed the pre-penalty results... caffeine even showed better results. Why would google do this? Emotions are involved. Highs and lows like this are very unhealthy. Has anyone seen behavior like this? Any observations you can offer? thanks, marc
This has been happening to our pages since early January. I don't think that it is due to a penalty. It might be due to duplicate content or more likely do to google screwing around with their new crap caffeine algorithm. Check the following threat that is just below this one and titled "Anyone noticing SERPS rolled back". You aren't the only one.
I'm pretty sure it was a penalty initially... I lost 90% of my traffic instantly. My site is 13 years old and was an established authority... this all doesn't make sense. marc
Two weeks ago, I had 3 pages that were on the first page in google for their respected keywords. In that time, some pages dropped 40-pages, some dropped 40 positions and others can't be found. Then every couple of days they re-emerge on page 1 just to disappear again. My pages aren't being blacklisted, they are being experimented with as are many other people's pages. I just want to let you know that it might not be a penalty. There are lots of people reporting this problem.
This has only happened once though. Unless that was the first time and I have a ton of fun on the horizon. Seems strange to go 2.5 months then come back for 24 hours then gone again. Even stranger that the results were exactly as I last saw them... as if in a time warp. I hope it's a sign of good things to come.
So you lost most of your rankings and they came back for 24 hours, went away the next day and came back 2 weeks later for good? marc
Maybe you want to check your site again for any other possible violations.. Have they send you a message through Webmaster tool that they have looked into the issue?
Unfortunately I was not tipped to this penalty in GWTs... after filing a reconsideration I have been getting the coined response 7-10 days later.
I hope we can keep this conversation going because this described by current problem perfectly. How old id your site? Mine is just about 12 months old and we have been knocked down and picked back up a couple of times as described over the past 3 weeks. I still don't think this is due to a penalty though but it is definately killing our business.
What will you say in this case: A blog with very high traffic hosted at blogspot.com is seeing ups and downs since the start of November, last year and finally yesterday the traffic drops to its lowest level with a fall of more than 90% from the usual level. Guys this has happened to my popular games blog. I am in tension now.
I think this is exactly the same thing that is being discussed here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1681034 Lots of people are reporting these problems. Unfortunately, the crazy jumps are killing our business.