I noticed a significant drop in Google traffic, and when checking some of the keywords that brought visitors to my site, I noticed most of them were no longer on the first page of search results (or the second, or the third, or the 25th). Crap, what happened? I was doing so well, now all of a sudden Google doesn't love me anymore. Has this happened to anyone else here? Could this be a temporary thing? I hope?
It happens. Your SERPs will go up and down. To help prevent going down keep your content up to date, ensure it is unique, and update (/add new content) regularily.
You shouldn't rely only in google. like noddegamra said, add fresh content every day, unique and quality. But even with that google can do this, up and down the rankings. Don't forget that google is allways full of spam and every single day they kick thousands of spam pages. That spam pages before being kicked, they normally take many top rankings (unfortunally).
That's what I'm doing, mostly. I'm worried because I recently published a couple of posts that were link lists to sites of interest for bloggers. Now I'm wondering if I put up too many links, making Google think I was some kind of link farm. Sh---.
It depends. Link farms have hundereds or even thousands. I wouldn't worry about 10 or so links, or even 50 if they are really helpful (links to tutorials, support etc for hardware). Infact, linking outwards can even improve rankings if they are related and quality/trusted sites.
It depends on your type of posts. Big ones like johnchow.com made that with the intent of getting target keyword results, and of course google punished them, they fall down alot in the rankings.
Don't worry, it's the google dance. every update shows up and downs in the rankings. If you have a PR6 and valid good backlinks, your site will return
That happened to one of my sites as well, but it happened right after I changed the layout... Did you update your site at all?
i didnt do anything special...just added some more pages (new user reviews) ohhh btw, i submitted several of my articles to article directories and blogs. may that cause any harm to my site?
That's weird... but the immediate loss of google traffic is exactly the same thing that happened to my site... Here's the thread: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=388128&highlight=semi-adult For my site, it took a while before the traffic starting coming again, but it's slowly working back up to where it was...
I had two major posts with 90 and more links (one I already posted in another forum here, regarding all the wordpress plugins I use...) I had another one called the Blogger's Toolbox with over 80 links, which I'm currently using as link bait to bring in digg-like traffic (I'm going to post that in another forum as well soon). But I wonder if I may have gone overboard. Both posts were actually on my index page for a short time, until I updated my content enough for one of the posts to et pushed into the archives. I was wondering because the the prediction tool I was using to predict my future pagerank had my site pegged with a pagerank of 5 next time Google updates, this being up from a measly 2. I hope it's right too, 5 would be a kickass start for me. Of course it'd all be moot if I end up in Google's doghouse for who knows why.
BTW, I don't purchase or sell links, and haven't made any recent changes to my site. I have a 1000+ good backlinks, which I worked damn hard to build. I really hope it is just the Google dance doing this, and I'll soon be back to prime time.
got back to page #1 for my primary keywords tonight after complete absense for 3 days. very wierd that google treat PR7 sites like that