If you guys were hit by the same thing I was it would have been late April 6th early April 7th with Google's latest backlink update and your Google traffic would have dropped from whatever it originally was to essentially 0 in the space of 24 hours. LOL personally I don't really care about my SERPs or PR as long as I have traffic. So many people try so hard to improve their PR thinking that it will improve their traffic but the reality is that the two for the most part are almost unrelated. That said you must be getting the extra traffic from somewhere - have you check your Analytics. It is always good to know where you are getting from so you can consolidate the source or attempt to increase it... . Well it is important if it is more than one small page - and I mean I think most of the time when my site is hit with an update that seems to have a severely negative effect it normally means that other sites were hit with the same thing, and if there are enough quality sites that are dropped from the index then you'd think it was a detrimental update in terms of providing the best possible results for searchers - which is basically what Google is after. There isn't a place where Google goes and sends your a message saying "look mate you site had dropped in ranking because of X" per se - but if you look at the major rankings factors as see there has been a massive change in your rankings as a result of a change in those factors it is normally easy enough to tell what the cause was. In this case it was my backlinks dropping from 3,000+ to 8; that's is a pretty dam big drop and obviously would result in drops in the my site's SERP rankings as well.
Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Praise Google my rankings are back 7 days after they were bombed from their SERPs. Good things come to those who wait!
w00p! w00p! w00p! w00p! Seven days is very quick for Google to fix one of their screwups, this is a good sign for everybody.
woke up this morning and found out my new site is now ranked 12 for my 2word-phrase, it was ranked 28 yesterday
quite the opposite happened to me. I went up the SERPs, the only thing that has dropped is pagerank -- which dropped even for major sites like cnn.com
What an absolutely stupid thing to write. There are going to be exactly the same number of people with sites going up in the rankings as people with sites going up.... Notting
Google = w00p! w00p! w00p! w00p! Yeah I must admit I was wonderfully surprised/impressed when I saw the return. I'll be honest and say that I was all bunkered down to have a lean month or two waiting for the next BL update or refresh, but to my great surprise I was wrong. Google you have gained an ounce of respect back from this cynical webmaster - well done! It was actually quite a good experience to have in the end. I mean I'll be honest and say sometimes I do get caught up in SERPs and SEO a little too much and forget about good old basic marketing techniques of supply a good service and utilizing word of mouth promotion, but when you take Google out of the equation your refocus on those things and your eyes really open to the other multitude of options you have to promote your sites/services/products. And I mean at the end of the day a week out of the SERPs was far from terrible - I, and I know many others, have had a lot worse - so I'm looking at this whole experiences as one of those "near misses experiences that give you great perspective". So thanks Google. I'd definitely support them periodically dropping all sites for short periods of time to remind the ultra SEO focussed that there is more to marketing that keyword density.