Hi, Recently one of my sites experienced a very large drop in google serps, I'm not sure why and wondered if anyone else had experienced this or might know why. We were previously ranking close to top 10 for a fairly competitive search term, but on tuesday we dropped a huge amount to around 230th. It seems that only our front page has dropped down the rankings, subpages that we have still rank top 10-20 for a few other related search terms.
This is something that usually occurs with newer sites, or when a site gets penalized. How old is your site? Did you do anything that may have caused you to get penalized?
Yeah there are lots of causes of SERP drops, we need more information to confirm anything. It could have to do with age, it could have to do with backlinks, it could have to do with having an artificial footprint, and Google just caught on. Give us more info.
Hi Namrepus, Could you explain more on 'artificial footprint'. I am still learning on this SEO things.
The site is nearly 5 years old, it's been PR4/PR5 for the last few years, it was not really seo optimised or linked for seo purposes until we began on it in august, since then it progressed to top 5 - top 40 for around 15 quite competitive keywords/phrases in it's niche. All linking has been fairly legitimate, some links have of course been purchased with high PR and it has plenty of backlinks from other usual places, forums/blogs etc. currently it has more backlinks than ever though. The large drop surprises me, I wouldn't have thought losing a few links would be able to cause such a huge drop, so wonder if this could be any kind of punishment. I would have thought total removal from the index would be more likely though instead of just dropping 200 places or so.
I'm having a similar problem with one of my sites... if its some kind of "google punishment" anyone know how longlasting it might be?