One of my Niches was hit in March. Although I'm pretty sure site speed had something to do with that because the site speed graph was super slow right up until the rankings dropped. And they made that big site speed announcement towards the end of March. Made a few minor changes, site speed is good now, but rankings still blow. On this thread, I have heard that the best going theory is that because of the huge difference in results between data centers. Most SEOs believe G is doing an entire re-index of the web. And because of this there will be little stability in rankings for a while.
The company I work for took a major hit not only for long-tail keywords but also for our brand name that we started and built up! Yet other web sites that have 'cloned' ours are still ranking at the top for our brand name. Why would that be?
The general feeling is to wait it out, and see what happens, if google is re-indexing and loading new data into a tweaked algorithm then the final results will not stablise for a while. We've all seen it before i.e. rankings fluctuate then couple of weeks later, sometimes days things are pretty much back to normal.
yes, there is nothing to do but wait and lose money every day. I will wait before starting to make any kind of changes
This has happened to my website too just these last few days. It is not only the brand name of my website but also an exact match keyword phrase describing the website. I was ranking 1 or 2 for the phrase and now I'm down at number 7. I hope this will fix itself as I'm sick of seeing websites above mine which are simply not as relevant to the keyphrase/brand name as my website.
New algo-stuff on google SE is going on from first day of May ... and yes, it's give you whole new F***** crap results on search And sad this it's major change .
Sadly I believe this is true. I believe it will all settle down and you will see "some kinda" stability after a month or so but for now everyone should hold onto their hats.
I am seeing very similar results across my sites - Google is definitely not behaving as normal at the moment. I have a new site that has just been added to Google but the site: query seems to be stuck on 12 pages and it has been for a while. I am expecting to see about 450 pages in total. Also in webmaster tools it has not updated inbound links in a while, plus the number of indexed pages compared to my sitemap is not matching the site: query. Very strange...
Forget even my sites. For about a month now, most searches I run on G for just personal interest stuff are total crap, not even close to relevant! I was looking for lawn mower the other day and I got three pages of people that would come and cut my grass. Not only that, I would say half of the companies they pushed were from overseas. I'm in NYC, anybody want to come cut my grass from Scotland? WTF G??? I actual find myself going over to Bing to get what I am looking for. If this keeps up by the end of the summer, I'm switching my personal search bars to Bing.
Yes, HUGE problems for me too. Late last week I woke up one morning to find that nearly all of my sites had fallen in the search engine rankings. It just doesn't make sense! I often have higher page rank and better quality sites than the ones now ahead of me. And my sites still rank high in Yahoo and Bing. I've never seen anything like this before (I've been doing online marketing for about 3 years). I've certainly had individual sites fluctuate, but never all my sites at once. My sites cover a variety of niches. I also have a variety of backlinks for each site. I've been reading about the changes to the Google algorithm, but my sites generally don't target long tail keywords. And everything was fine throughout May. Everything in Google Webmaster Tools checks out OK. But I do notice that under "Crawl Errors" it now says "no data available." There used to be data available, but not now. This goes for all of my sites. Could there be a relationship between this and my sites falling in the SERPS? This is just so frustrating. I was starting to do really well (best month ever in May) and now this. I really hope things return to "normal" soon.
Some thing happened to me. In Feb. to Mid-March my sites were the highest they have every been in the rankings. Then Mid-March everything tanked and it hasn't recovered since. I play no games only simple white Hat SEO. The only thing I could relate it to in WMT was site speed.
weird, this happened to you 3 months ago? same symptoms - the important words- or just long tail terms?
Mostly longtails. But, the really weird thing is that I have the same rank (worldwide) as I did last year this time for a number of good keywords, but the traffic coming to them is about half of what it was last year. And the ranking did not change at all on those words.
could be related to the season? I have such websites, with more traffic during the summer. Check the countries the traffic is coming from, maybe you notice a pattern, for the last months. Though my websites lost rankings for the main words, some lost only 4-10 ranks, some hundreds..
I have not seen any changes on my end. I do have to say and I know no one likes to hear this but everytime a sites drops another site goes up...So what is the reason for the drop? That is the overall question each and every time. Could it be a penalty? Could it be new links (good or bad) pointing to the site or is it something o messed up on Googles end?
I did look at anything that could be construed by Google as a trick or penalty level stuff. I found a few things like duplicate content and bad 301 redirects. I submitted a reconsideration request. It was processed and nothing changed. Last week I found something that might have drawn a penalty. This site is 11 years old, about 6 years ago we started a program with community architect that allowed users to create their own free web page using a sub-domain of their choice under our root domain. We serve our wildcard DNS to community architect and they redirect it to their server. I forgot all about this. 2 really bad things about this: 1. They put 2 links on every single subdomain page that link right back to the root domain. One link has the anchor text "Free Web Hosting" the other is a link off of an image, so that's a blank link to google. Since there are about 10,000 websites (subdomains; mostly deserted) that's about 30-40K links like this. Can you say "Mega-Spamish" 2. They don't police it well. When I looked into it last week I found sites with pharmacy junk, and other SPam-I-AM, Phising sites. I booted myself out of that program ASAP and explained it to big G in a second reconsideration request. I guess we'll see where it goes from here.