I am really obsessed to say that my ranking have been badly affected in the last couple of days. And by "bad" I mean that I have stopped ranking in the first 10 pages of SERPs for my own site name. The site in question here is http://www.gamelet.net I used to ranking No.2 for "Gamelet" and No.1 for a really competitive keyword. As I was going through the traffic stats, I saw that The Google traffic had dropped to zero and I knew something was not right. When I checked where I rank in Google, I was obsessed. I don't think I have violated any of the Webmaster Guideline. Can any one here guide me?
I would need to ask you some questions before I could help you on that. 1. How old is your domain? 2. Are you scraping content from other websites? 3. Are you linking from websites that have been penalized? 4. Are you building links too fast? If you have done any of questions 2, 3 or 4 it is a penalty. If your domain is new you may just been sandboxed. If you have been sandboxed just continue to build quality links back to your site nice and slow and you will eventually emerge from the sandbox. How long were you rankings for those terms? Usually Google will drive your site to rank to the top really quickly right before you become sandboxed. If this is the case you will eventually emerge from the sandbox and regain those rankings. Just continue to build quality links to your website and keep creating fresh unique content and you be very happy!
Did you do any major SEO changes lately? If not: I exprienced something similar a while back. No google traffic for a couple of days, so started panicking (goes to show how much power they really have..) It was restored again after a few days though, and since then I've been climbing steadily. Now I rank 5th for my main target keyword, so that's nice btw: @ adbuckle --> I don't think your 3rd point is correct (unless you meant his own sites that have been penalized). If google were to penalize people for inlinks, their whole system of "a link as a statement of trust" would be invalid. It would be the easiest thing in the world to ruin competitors' sites by sending tons of bad links their way. It's probably a plus to get links from good trusted sites, but not that much of a minus from all the crappy ones. Links out on the other hand... now, those you control yourself. So if you link to a lot of bad sites, that's probably not doing you any good. The outbound links are often overlooked imo. People are real protective of their "link juice", but should they be? After all, outbound links tell the SE which sites you consider worthy of a link and which sites you "identify" with. If you are linking to autority sites that google know to be serious and trustworthy, that's a show of good judgement on your part. just my 2 cents..
I have been seeing many shifts in SERPs for many keywords I shoot for. Could be a sign of a new algo update in the making.
Check to see if your site has been hacked and hidden links have been added to your site. I see that you are using some sort of CMS and Its possible that could be the cause of your deranking.
If you are just copying content then google may have penalised you in some way and this seems the most likely explanation if your ramking has suddenly dropped. Remember to keep your content original and keep building back links via article marketing, blogging on do follow blogs and link exchanges.