This may be old news but it's new to me... One of my sites was being moderately successful in terms of Google page rank. I was getting pretty good placement for some competitive key words. I thought I'd buy some Google ad words and get some new traffic. I left things alone for about a month and didn't bother to look at my rankings. I was shocked to see my site dropped off the rankings all together. I was still in Google but searching for the same competitive keywords showed nothing. I suspended the AdWords champaign and within a few days my placement for the key words returned to normal.
Sounds like they wanted you to pay for all your traffic after they found out site was listed in adwords.
I don't think that the organic results and paid results have any relation between them ,otherwise that will damage the most important thing "trust" and google won't take that risk. It must be something different , imo. Is it a new site ?
Nope. The site has been online for 2+ years and has a PR of 5. I was just wondering if anyone else noticed something similar or if the behavior I saw was a fluke.
I sometimes use adwords from time to time but did not observed such change on none of my sites , as I said this would be very risky for google , people will be afraid of using adwords.There should be another reason.
i havent noticed that, since last i checked, my serps actually got a bit better since i started using adwords
yeah google dance might be an answer. sometime it's kinda robot faults that they forgot to report your site or lazy not to visit your site (joking hehe) but at least it's good that you can get back to your top 10 rank again.