I have a PR5 blog that up until yesterday was ranking #8 for my keywords and slowly moving upwards. Today I'm #245 for the same phrase. The difference, it seems, is that something went wrong when the Googlebot last visited my site 2 days ago. After checking my stats via Google's Webmaster tools, I've found that it's only linking to 3 pages under site:url . I haven't got any dodgy backlinks. I only write quality content (ie. no spam) and these last two days should be the busiest for me in terms of search. What happened?
sounds like google. wait and check again tomorrow.. G does weird stuff like this sometime.. cheers -Bs
Relax buddy, google is starting to dance soon, the party is about to begging and musical chairs are being played Wait it out, things will calm down after the update.
It's the Gardening one right? and your main phrase is gardening tips right? That is a scary drop, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you have been doing alot of link building recently or possibly alot of people have linked to you and used the phrase Garnening tips n ideas or just gardening tips this has probably triped some kind of filter and caused the drop, this can easily happen to sites that are less then a year old, try and get links using different anchor text and be gentle, big blog roll links are the worst for a newish blog, one of my blogs is going through a similar thing at the moment: http://ukseodirectory.wordpress.com It has that many links saying UK SEO Directory Blog that it just won't rank for it, I'm sure it will with time, other phrases that are way more competitive it ranks for, it's a funny thing, your blog does look very nice and I am sure you will get it back soon.
content is nice, but you need backlinks also. do some seo. try article submission adn directory submission. that will help you a lot! optimize your keywords, make those keywords as anchor text in some high pr,7,8 sites, and you will be back in the top ranks. anyways, the rankings dose fluctuates, so wait for a week and then see if you get your ranks! might be simple up and down
Crash-test - this is not much info to any advices - you should write how long you were at #8 and how old is your site. Anyway - you can jump around during two weeks, so that you went down for a day means nothing. Start to worry if you won't back in week or two...
Cheers fellas. Really appreciate the advice and the words of optimism. I shall be patient and see how this pans out.
Ok. It's been two weeks now and I still haven't returned to my original spot. I am moving forward however and am now #159 for my keyword phrase but nowhere near #8 that I was enjoying previously. I'm wondering whether this drop has anything to do with the paid link debate raging at the moment and whether Google are tickling some algorithms against sites such as ReviewMe and Text-Link Ads? Any ideas?
So far this is what I see you should do as well .. Build slow you will gather more in the long run. Google ..loves Google so you just have to be there to combat there strick changes without notice.. lol Tk
Sometimes the hardest thing to do in SEO is to do nothing... It's a scary feeling when your results drop like a stone off of a cliff, but if you haven't been doing anything dodgy it may well be that there was a slight 'google-justment' in the ranking algorthym. Don't sweat it - these things tend to correct themselves over the course of a few days or weeks. Just concentrate on adding more quality content and obtaining more quality inbound links. All the best... Ian C
Sometimes google is weird. Before I can see many backlinks of my blog on google webmaster tool but now I don't see any backlinks.
dunno it's pretty weird, google only shows 2 backlinks for my site yet it's a pr4 and has 300 backlinks on yahoo site explorer... ps: it ranks on the second page for its 3 main keywords.