I have seen two drops and one return on SERPs for SalaryMap.com in th last month or so. When I say drop I mean going from 60%+ traffic coming from Google organic to zero. When I am getting in the SERPs I am getting lots of long tail results for data added to the site as recently as 24 hours. I have other sites that I consider rather stale yet they have steady SERPs and traffic. My theory is that before an update Google has a very dynamic set of search results, including recent content. During an update period, search results are pulled from a more static data set which wouldn't include newer content. I hope I am right and I hope they get done soon
Hope you are right. Please keep us updated when/if SERPS returns. I will do the same as I have had terms go from page 1 to page 10+. For me, the manufacture sites are hitting page one while the sites that sell product are nowhere to be seen. This tends to jive with your theory.
my site experienced serp drops around the 1st of the last 2 months and it last about 12 days... since it just came back last night.
I hate google updates, google overcomplicates everything so much, 1 minute you are ranking well, and the next minute, nothing!
First, a static set would be data that doesn't change often so search results would not be too up to date. Dynamic would be constantly updated. I have seen new user data show up in SERPs a day or two after they are entered in the SalaryMap.com web site. Google's was adding very new data and in many cases a long term for a job title would float right to the top of search results. Putting it another way, dynamic was up to the minute search results.
Okay I got the same problem and when the days go by i'm thinking it can be because of the new penalties on link exchanges. I completely removed my links just to see if my rankings will now become back to normal...(you never know)
up and down like a yoyo google does eventually stabilise for sites that have been around a while as I have found this to be the case
Nah i've got both old and new pages that stay stable on different stages of the update cycle, on both new and old domains. Google are always refining their algo, its more likely they are testing different scoring methods on keyphrases that have been returning results they arnt fully happy with. I know they are doing alot on the "Query Deserves Freshness" scoring.
usually it is newer sites that are volatile. once your site has been around for awhile, the rankings using stabilize
I hadn't considered Query Deserves Freshness before. For the searches I was getting they were salary related and my data was very fresh so maybe I was benefiting from that. I was building up to 1000 visitors per day, then I went to zero for a few weeks, then to 1600 per day for a week, now I am back around zero for about 5 days. I had removed a few link exchanges before the drop, they were general business links not related to salary or employment but they weren't overly spammy. So I am not thinking it was any on site penalties.
This might make sense - I don't feel that the SERPS are "playing with a full deck" so to speak. I have a subpage that is dedicated to a certain niche keyword. It's not brand new but is perhaps only 4-5 months old. My sitemap page that has existed since my site inception ranks at #13 for this keyword with no external anchored text links - just the text on the page. Yet, my subpage with a fair number of backlinks and completely dedicated to the subject is ranked #53. If this is an algorithm change to refine relevance, it's a pretty poor one. My guess is something is either messed up or google is using an incomplete set of factors for ranking pages at this point.
Interesting theory, but I think this is not so simple. There are many people in google who works with search alghorithms and they test many things very often. Some of my sites had two or three huge drops (about two weeks each time) and this happened just after last PR update. I think there are many reasons which can cause this kind of drops and there not has to be any hard rule for every time and every site - you know what I mean - as said above - they work on their system constantly and it changes even today. This is some kind of evolution.
My theory is that they purposely set up all these new tough filters for new websites to make sure people just don't optimize and spend money on links and all but also on adwords
Many people do not believe this to be the case but about 2 years ago I got banned from adsense for accidentally playing with the code.The funny thing is within a few weeks I had dropped out of the Google serps. I was doing very well for most of my keywords. It took over a year before I started showing up again and still I am no where near where I once was. I have talked to some people since some of them stopped using adsense and others had been banned from adsense. Regardless of the reason they stopped using adsense and they all dropped big time.I am not saying that this is total proof but it sure seems that it is from the people I have talked to.. Who knows. Has anyone else had a simialar issue? I also want to comment that it was only one of my sites that this happened to. the others I do not use adsense on and they do fine.
I have never experienced this...maybe your site was doing something bad that got you penalized and banned from adsense