HUGE Rankings Drop - Will They Come Back?

I recently, like in the last 24 hours, have virtually had every term that my site ranked in Google for drop out of the top 10, and I'm now ranking on page 3, 4 and 5. I'll be honest and say I'm a little bit worried, I mean good Google rankings are very important to my site.

Anyway I was just wondering if other people have been noticing their site's being virtually dropped by Google recently and if they have found that they go back to normal after a short period, or is this most likely Google penalising me for something more sinister. I know Google is going a little bit crazy at the moment so I'm slightly hopeful that my rankings will return in a couple of days, but I sure would like to hear that this isn't unusual from someone else to reaffirm me.

 

Two reasons

a) googles updating their dataservers and might have a little drop in your rankings

b) you started putting up ads, most likely yahoo publisher network ads and google doesnt like it

 

This happened to me recently also with one of my sites. I was ranked 5 on google for a high searched key phrase. I changed to YPN and shortly after (a week or two later), they dropped my rank many pages down on the list. I'm still on the first page on all other search engines. I didn't put two and two together until you mentioned it.

Have other's seen this same thing happen?

 

That's a bold statement. do you have anything to back it up?
I have YPN on several pages, and G loves them just as much as ever. I also see very highly ranked pages with Y! on them all the time.. and, this is just a guess, but if what you posted was true, I think the lawyers over at Y! would be knocking down the doors at G ..

Please give us more info .

 

I recently put YPN on everyone of my pages..

Google decreased my traffic by up to half..

Now i took off YPN and waiting for results to come back

 

If your google results come back that would be one heck of a coincidence. If it happens you should let the people at Y know that. Of course they may never respond, but for something like that you might just get someone's attention.

 

I can even show you my stats

I put my YPN ads on friday through monday (16-18th)
day users pageviews hits mb
14 Jun 2006 658 7487 20253 367.44 MB
15 Jun 2006 607 9079 26820 437.61 MB
16 Jun 2006 571 6622 23439 365.82 MB
17 Jun 2006 591 7309 20930 277.55 MB
18 Jun 2006 547 3488 13896 122.76 MB
19 Jun 2006 596 4137 17293 144.34 MB
20 Jun 2006 461 3373 11939 105.88 MB
21 Jun 2006 432 2679 10848 102.61 MB

Then traffic decreased on 20th-21st, first time it's ever decreased by that much of a percenatage.

Oh and whats up with my pageviews too eh???

 

I bet you ate carrots the week before the 20th, too. Dont you know that eating carrots will decrease your G ranking? It's true, your stats PROVE it !

Seriously though.
I dont think even G could react that quickly to your change to Ypn. Does google pick up your page changes that fast? can google even push a PR change or SERP change thru all it's DC's that fast?

MAYBEE it's something else.. school, letting out for example? I dont know, i'm just guessing - but your dataset is just too small to draw such a large, far-reaching conclusion.

If Google actually 'punished' publishers for using YPN instead of Adsense, can you IMAGINE the class-action lawsuits and monopoly investigations??

 

Google indexes my pages within 1-2 days.. Its constantly going through my site since its getting constant updates etc.

Wouldnt it be a smart buisness plan for google to drop sites that are using YPN.. Theres no legal law saying they must push traffic to your site.

 

I've also dropped just like tonight and I am worried and this drop is very odd as my site has very good backlinks and enough to compete with. I am hoping this huge Google dance comes to an end and I am back for the first page soon.

 

It would NOT be a smart business plan Tom, because Y would SUE the sheat out of google so fast, and Y would WIN.. not good business for for Google.. You are right that there is no law saying google has to send you traffic. but there ARE laws saying that google can not use their GIANT market dominance to push Y down the tubes. This would be anti-competitive and they would quickly be in big trouble.

.. i think, as Jeff said, it's just part of the big, fun, roller-coaster ride we've come to know as the Google-Dance ..

 

ive had this happen to me... sometimes it lasted a month. Are you using sitemaps? If so that will show you if you have some form of penalty. It is probably just standard google flux

 

Shoemoney !! I read your interview with you on the YPN

Whens the next Web publishers conference and where? I'd love to meeat all you successfull people.

 

Heyy.. i'm successfull too!

(just not as much as Shoe) :-(

 

I do use sitemaps, thought i don't use sitemaps for the sitemaps purpose (ie to submit a sitemap) I use it for it's data about what my site is ranking for in terms of search terms etc etc. But I was wondering if your site is penalised, will it show up in sitemaps, like actually say "site being penalised for yada yada" or do you have to work it out for yourself like "hmm my site was virtually deranked from all my search terms... maybe I'm being penalised" that said I don't think I have done anything worthy of being significantly penalised as long as you don't call linking between the sites I own and buying the odd link or two (the vast majority of my inbound links are all natural)...

I also don't run YPN so I guess I'm banking on a datacenter update... I mean this is the most likely answer, but it doesn't make me very confident with my site now being ranked 50+ for its main search term. And I mean should I look at this as a little Google dance or is this more sinister in that it's a vision of things to come and this rank will be transferred across all the datacenters in the next major update?

 

have you made any changes to your site recently? H1/title changes, pagename changes, changes over lots of pages, anything?

 

No not really, nothing significant anyway, a small link here or there.

 

I highly think this could be a massive Google Dance if you want to call it because like I said before I was pretty solid before tonight on rankings and all so I do expect to return so your site should also return.

 

Well that is good to hear. I mean my site has been ranking well in Google for these terms for two years now, and nothing major has changed in the last few weeks.

 

Have you checked wether or not your site is been effected by this de-indexing bollocks?

I have lost another 100 pages this week from it causing my traffic to plummet.. now I'm down to 63 pages (from 236).

May be it's this.

Pete