I have a site www.oddsnavigator.eu which had roughly 1000 daily visitors coming through Google search, with around 15.000 appearances in SERPs daily. Some 30 days ago it suddenly dropped to around 400 appearances and less than 30 clicks per day. There are around 600.000 URLs indexed by Google, though the number differs depending on the regional version of Google. I've searched for an answer about this and found that this could be the usual thing Google does before deciding on the new ranking of the website. Your rank decreases only to get back to a better rank than you've had before. The thing that triggered all this could be the Sitemap. I used to have a Sitemap with 30.000 links, and then submitted a new, complete one, with 220.000 links. It took almost a month, some 25 days, for Google to go through that Sitemap and index all URLs from it. At this moment the status of the Sitemap is 221.347 URLs indexed from 229.227 URLs in the Sitemap. There a lot of crawl errors I see in Google Webmaster Tools, but they've been there before. All the time. Is it possible that Google suddenly decided to penalize me for that, after tolerating it for 7 months? Or could it be that due to the increased number of URLs submitted, Google decided to reset the ranking for the entire site, and is currently trying to find a good place in the SERPs for my site? All suggestions would be very helpful as I don't know where the problem is so I can fix it. If you've had something like this happen to you before, please share your experience.
I'd just like to add that, apart from submitting a new Sitemap, I started using canonicalization around that time. Each page on my dynamically generated (PHP) site has 20-30 versions depending on sorting options and stuff like that, and I added a correct canonical URL for each page. Maybe that caused all this?
You didn't read the post fully. I said there was a big reduction in the number of pages which appear in SERPs. It went down from 15.000 appearances to mere 400.
You need to conduct a proper analysis of your site so you have actionable data to make educated decisions from. I would start with this http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/tu...acklink-profile-for-current-future-penalties/