i had a similar thing happen last couple weeks. google and yahoo were both doing great (1 to 5 for my target keywords) and then they all dropped when msn started ranking me well. slowly trying to work out what went wrong (might be duplicate content issues).
It's happening across the board. Check out the "update" thread in this same forum. There's a link to a thread on seochat which gives a theory on this. My traffic has gone down by over 60% also. Edit: here's the link: http://forums.seochat.com/t34148/s.html
I lost several 1st spot on google .. and my traffic gone down by 70% What i hate them about is that every websites that displaced me on google are all spammy pages.
By traffic, do you mean revenue? Wouldn't it help to put at least 10% of revenue toward paid advertising for times like this? My thought is while we profit from the serps, we should feed it too so it's a win win.
Paid advertising works for sites which sell products and services. Paid advertising does not work for information-only sites. Or, are you recommending spending X on AdSense advertising with the reasonable expectation of receiving less than X in return? Let's see... pay AdSense to get a visitor... CTR of say... 2%... you lose 98% plus the cost of overhead. Nice!
Let me understand how using income from playing the serps for free is a loss when traffic stays consistant? I can't grasp that. Will, you think in 10 minute terms. Open up a bit here.
Things are going back to normal : I'm selling products online.. and yes .. paid advertising is helping me alot ..
Let's see, it was a weekend for starters, checking it every ten minutes was a waste of time, and everything is back to normal. Imagine that! I wounder if Will had similar results? :/ Glad all is well!