For the past few weeks I have noticed some horrific changes within the Google search engine. A few of my niche blogs suddenly flew off the radar and then I started studying various queries and I have noticed that there are fluctuations taking place for many other sites. For example, in one such niche an Ezine article will sit in first place one day and the next will fly down to the 17th page. The next day it jumps back and then it will go back down. I know personalised search is around now, but I ain't clicking on any pages, I'm simply moving from page one, to page two, to page three etc. I know they're doing the whole Twitter integration atm and it just seems like they are fiddling around too much. I have a new niche blog that is no more than a few weeks old and in Google it is sitting around the 19th page and I noticed that a few days ago it hit the first page of Bing. What is interesting is that the Bing result showed the new meta description tag that I had added whilst the Google result showed the old one. Yesterday I updated the meta tags and checking today Bing had updated them again, whilst Google is still in the first phase. I know this might sound like a whinge, but Google looks very unstable at the moment and I'm starting to believe that Bing (or someone else) can take advantage. I have always got 90%+ of my traffic to all of my sites from Google and so am thankful to them, but I think that may be a thing of the past. I'm already looking at newer traffic methods such as paid classified listings, adding links to Wiki pages etc. Just be careful guys, putting eggs in the Google basket doesn't seem like a very wise move at the moment. Maybe it's just my dodgy link building techniques lol!
45% of my traffic comes from Google and suffering undeserved drops in my opinion. First site to cover VH1 reality television, even before vh1.com itself. Yet a whole crop of new sites less than a year old are ahead of me for crucial keywords.
I've noticed this for a few of my keywords also. Maybe its something to do with competitors? I don't think Bing is going to step in and do anything to Google right now. I get less than %5 for all my SE traffic from Bing. I don't even bother with them right now.
Buddy I understand how you feel and it truly sucks! This is google's caffeine and yes too much the engineers had when designing it, lol... I lost my number one bread earning keyword since it's rollout, and now consider branding and community building as the only long term solution. SERP's is definitely a merciless beast and tamed only by those who are willing to pay for it in the long run. ROOFIS
I think that making that kind of accusations is too insane. Google leads the search engine market. I'm pretty sure that there's no problem with their services. There are hundreds or thousands of people working daily trying to improve the service. So just check all your SEO stuff.
Cheers for the replies guys. It is interesting that others are experiencing these weird fluctuations as well; just read some similar topics before on the Warrior Forum. Maybe they are just playing around with the algo which is pretty common around holiday time.
I noticed about 3 weeks back one of our sites was into the top 25 for a few major keywords then they just dropped off the radar for no reason and at one stage went sub 100 but in the last week they have come back up again and infact are going higher,why i am not sure as we have not changed anything but i guess only google has the answer to the hugh drop.