Last Wed (06/25/08) i had, and had previously averaged for the whole year (& ~year previous), consistently larger traffic every month, w/it ending in the last several months w/no less than 5-6-7k+ unique organic hits from google a day. ~160k unique last month, Just to give an idea; I could have a (new) page indexed within an hour, no more then a few. Over 50k pages (55k indexed), ~3k sections, ~1k feeds, ~150-250 return visitors a day (not counting feed usage) (thousand+/~1.5k a week) (still) ~constant indexing by * engines. Site is a little over 3 years old. - It appears they are at least (still) indexing the front page every day (which changes every day, more-so by ~hour) Last Thurs (06/26/08) - I completely fell off the map it appears. I'm barely getting 800-1k hits a day from google since. I start searching on phrases that i previously ranked or floated high on and i'm not even within the first ~150 results. They are also changing which pages some phrases point to, in that they normally (logically & preferably for users) would be pointing to the main page (of the site, or core of specific subject) now it's floating around picking sub pages to point to (sub of main, sub of cores) On the primary phrase that i normally rank within top 15 of 65M+ i'm seeing garbage sites that, literally ~don't even have a front page. Yeah their registered but there's absolutely no content on one of them in particular. The only 'match' is the domain name to the search. In other instances the results are ancient, as in 2005ish. This tells me google has made a bad decision &/or spam has just leaked in big time. Not only that but the results that are popping up now are either not relavent to the phrase at all (google doesn't know the order of words) or a user would really never be interested in (i know my niche well) - some of the pages returned are so specific (vs ~wide search) that' it'd be nearly impossible for the user to actually be looking for what google returned as a result. (ie, no one would ever click that) So wtf is going on? seriously? i'm looking at spam here & it's really insulting to be outranked by spam or totally irrelevant (&/or ancient) results. It's not like some one just slipped in (or several) who are better than me. Hardly the case at all. Oh and the obvious, i haven't changed a damn thing. No really. Thought i was on the path for success wasn't about to fuq it up.
Hold on a bit it could just be a burp, don't do anything drastic for a week or two. You're still indexed.
Well, the same thing happened to me. I went from 4,000 uv per day to about 1,500. I really wish that I knew the answer.
If your still indexed then it could just be a hick-up. It happened to me a few weeks ago. I dropped like a stone in the SERPS. I still had PR and no messages from google web tools. Then poof 5 days later I was back on page 1. I messed with some of my outbound links, but the correction came before I was indexed again.
This happened to me last sunday. I haven't recovered yet. I'm hoping I recover soon I'm still indexed and everything seems fine except I totally dropped off the map.
I have noticed as of late a lot of Google hiccups. Just stick in there it will probably come back within a few weeks.
something sure is boiling in the background, Google used to give away up to 100 pages of results or 1000 results in the SERP, now it plays along 600. so about 40% of GOOGLE is offline or shall we say GOOGLE is in safe mode. better wait for it till the next 3 months, but with the dance like this big, a major algo change is in the making. My suspect is that damn SMX advanced conferenced they have in seattle, where most of the "underground" black hat techniques were exposed and the MORAL COMPASS of SEO Matt Cutts huddled his spam team and messed up the data centers. Blackhats! what were you guys thinking???? why'd you spill the beans!!!!! damn