Google minus 10 penalty?

One of my sites has gone from #7 to #17 overnight for its main search phrase in Google SERPs. All other search phrases seem to be holding their rank. All pages are still indexed, no PR change, reports in webmaster tools the same as they have been for some months now - apart from the number of external links reported in webmaster tools recently (last 3 weeks) having gone up signifcantly from the number that was being reported before.

Is this a penalty of some sort - any clues or views welcome!

 

looks like. Did you do something wrong recent days?

 

May be you used some wrong methods for building links.

 

It could just be a fluctuation in the results - I wouldn't jump to conclusions unless it's been like that for a week or more.

 

Same thing has happened to me today- but for most of my keywords. They hadbeen more than holding there own for months, at very decent positions then today they appear to have dropped like a stone. My main keyword has dropped 30 positions

 

google is coming out with the new page rank i think

 

Google might be busy with update

 

Nah My friend too got penalty and lost his PAge Rank 4 to 0 and He was saying there are no SERP problems appearing yet. Organic traffic is Same. He got penalty because he sold some links of POKER sites

 

I have exactly the same problem. For some search terms, my site's ranking dropped significantly. The ranking for some keywords was around 10 -13 now the site appears on page 7!!.

The last change I made ( as far as I remember) to wrap my important keywords with <strong> tags. (i.e. <strong class="no_bold_text">...</strong>)

I used css to manipulate the <strong> tags so that the font weight would be normal. When my rankings dropped significantly, I thought the site has been penalised for this and deleted these tags immediately.

In the webmaster tools, rankings still seem good though.

 

Mine regularly jumps from page 1 to pag 5. Nothing alarming really

 

I think you should wait for few days, may be you will get back to the 7th position.

 

I think this usually happens when google is updating their linking structure,
things should be back to normal in due time.

 

Maybe it's just a normal fluctuation in SERPs, no worry.

 

I also think it's normal. I also noticed some recent fluctuations in SERPs for the past following days.

 

I think it's just a database update maybe there using old info

 

Thanks for the responses everyone. Well, 24 hours later we've moved from 17 to 15 on some data centres (16 on others). I'm beginning to agree with those who have suggested its a SERPs fluctuation and maybe to wait a week or so. Maybe because of reported link updating - as I said above, the number of links reported on webmaster tools increased substantially in the last couple of weeks. In fact they almost doubled (which was pleasing at the time).

We've been dancing between #4 and #7 for a couple of weeks now and then last week seemed to settle at #7. You can imagine my horror when I checked the other day and saw that#7 had changed to #17! The thing that worries me is that whilst competitors on the first page of SERPs are also dancing about, they're all still on page 1. And as a result our traffic has been adversly affected.

Has anyone else had a substantial increase in reported links in the last few weeks?

 

What is interesting, Google can as well rank up you for some keywords but for a very limited time... Once I added a link to a site to a very trustworthy resource and my ranking went up to #1 from # 10 for a day or so. So that happens in both directions...

 

Even my website dropped as well by many keyword from 5-10 steps backwards. Don't know whats happening..