We are so confused. A year ago I put so much SEO work into our site and we have ranked high on the first page for the search term "hockey equipment" in Google for about the last year. Our site has been around since 1998 and we have enough links pointing to us for Google to give us a PR4. 2 weeks ago, we completely dropped off the map. We didn't change our site or anything. We are now on the 4th page for "hockey equipment". And we have dropped off for most other of our big search terms. Our site: discounthockey.com And it's just us! It seems as if we have been hit specifically because all of our competition is still exactly where they have always been on the first page. We are the only site that dropped off. We have the same keyword densities, amount of text on the screen, and links as most of our competitors. You will notice we have a lot of pictures on our front page instead of text, but so does most of our competition. Why is everyone all of a sudden killing us? I have done so much research about SEO in the last couple of years and I am just scratching my head here. Sure there is a lot more we could do to our site like putting up more articles and getting more links obviously, but it just doesn't make sense how we were up there and we all of a sudden are now gone. Possible reasons It seems like usually when webmasters freak out like me it is because google has changed their algorithm, but I can't see how it would effect our site and not our competition... It makes me wonder if our site specifically has been punished? But I have no way to know if that's the case? Any advice would be greatly appreciated I would appreciate it SO MUCH if someone could just take a quick look at our site and see if they could and see anything we are doing wrong that could have lead to this? Is there any way to know if Google specifically did something to OUR site? or if someone reported us for some kind of spam? I have no idea how that kind of stuff works. I feel like someone out there has sabotaged us or something... It's very sad and is killing our business. Truly thanks to anyone in advance, Jason
There was a big shake up with the google algorithm that first showed up on June 4th 2008. Many sites with thousands of pages that have been around longer than google have been affected. From my reading no one has figured out what google is targeting. Do a google search for "google serp changes june 4th" and you can read what people are reporting and see if your site falls into the same category. A few other things you might want to read up on is "-30 penalty" and "-950 penalty" to see if your site has been affected by one of them.
It was probably around June 4th as freelistfool said... I would just give it time and it should sort itself back out. IMO I wouldn't change to much right now, just keep doing what you have done in the past.
Probably Google tends to change their algorithm without further notice. And eventually afffects the sites
"-It's an algo update push. -overly seo'd sites -don't listen to what SEO forums say -don't optimize quite as much" http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/013473.html Wow. That sucks
i think google may play with all sites, whereas its manipulating search engine, we might be migrated by google.
Hi, Google change his algo time to time so i think you just add some fresh content and write some fresh article and doing some off page activities, Google Loves you. Thanks!