I have had a site online for 4 years now with no changes at all. It has averaged 100 visits a day for 4 years and last month I decided to update the information. I made no major changes at all and only on the index page. In fact I did 100% proper SEO than what I knew 4 years ago and what Google recommends. Since I have done that, Google has basically dropped my entire site? It went to 5 visits a day. Why? Don't they want fresh information? Are they telling us is that they are happy with static old information instead of something new? I am being punished for updating my site. What choice do I have now? I can't go back but I wish I could put back the old outdated site Google had. At least I would have 100 visits a day.
lol.. your new content or site or design again crawled?... did changed keyphrases keywords with what saerched odne to your site?... if yes.. its your fault :d
you're right. also, how long was it since you changed? a day ago? i believe google will take time to update its datacenters.
Might only be temporary... Or maybe not. Did you change any H1/Title tags or URLS? this could affect your rankings temporarily ..
Yes, I understand that you can shock Google by drastic changes but I never did that. Infact I improved it with the standards they ask for. I kept the same theme, I added and subtracted keywords and in total I would say it changed 30% to what the original content was. Improved sentences, etc. Nothing major. It is as if Google said "This person started working on this site after 4 years, lets put them down in ranking since we see they are finally doing some work on it." So much for improving imformation online.
Because of your changes your rankings are affected. The google might indexing your new updates on your sites. Be patient.
I will update this posting as time goes on. It will be a good test case of what can happen with changing a site after leaving it sit for 4 years. I have others also I have never touched and now I am afraid to do any work on them. Is that right? I sure don't think so. But it has come down to the point that working on your site may hurt you.
as the other peoples said, it should be temp, But if you changed the featured keywords or pharazes which gathering visitors from google thats why , l wish you have had a counter which you would observing the keywords. you would understand which keywords are important for google. anyway l think temp too..
Yes, I understand that. I have been around in the days before the Google Sandbox. I have been doing SEO when you could buy a PR 6 and change the theme and the site would rank high within a couple days. If anyone knows about shocking google with new unthemed content I have learned it well.
You look like you are in despair. But surely, this appears to be temporary and traffic will restore when your changes are crawled. OR has it done already?
I did the same as you, added a little more content, affil links etc, went from 300 uv's down to around 35 on a good day, Completely dropped by G... therefore traced back all my changes, removed addit affil links/ any non-relative links and cleaned up code, then filed a reinclusion request. time to now wait, site is around 13 months old hope this helps