While there have been a ton of PR threads, I have not seen too many on pure Google traffic/rankings. Starting on the 10th, one of my main client sites lost about 40% of it's traffic in one day and still is to this day, due to the latest Google update. (Page Rank is ok at PR5). Yahoo and other SE's are ranking it fine. The main problem is that (as some others have mentioned) that a lot of the high-ranking keywords and keyphrases have either gone from a Top 10-20 ranking to way down the rankings or have vanished altogether. I am also seeing incomplete indexing, as some pages/posts have only two links to them, when they should have four within the site's hierarchy. I am still seeing this after two-plus weeks and it is starting to get very old. Even more annoying was the site did a major conversion back in October and after the conversion and optimization were completed, traffic and overall keyword/keyphrase were ranking their best ever, then BOOM, this latest update have ground things to a halt. Which needless to say, has hurt with advertising revenue in addition to the traffic/listing issues. Now, I know updates of this kind happen in a staggered fashion and some sites have already gone through the whole update process and in a lot of cases, are better off traffic and ranking-wise for it. I am just wondering for those sites, if the whole process was just a matter of days, weeks or even a month or more, as this update is the most hosed-up one I have seen since Google started changing/playing with their old algorithims a few years ago.
Without seeing the site it is hard to give a diagnosis. The update we saw was for the toolbar PR, it has nothing to do (as I understand it) with the actual PR google uses. The fluctuations people see, including you, are - again as I understand it - part of the fact that google literally updates their internal metrics daily. It could get better all by itself, but I would not count on it. If the on-site SEO is fine, off-site SEO is the other possible area that needs to be targeted. Without seeing the site I would guess the links to your site are not on topic enough - or competition got more SEO-savy in the last few months.
My best link magnet site did just that... first on jun-27 where it vanished till jul-27... so a full month. Then it stayed cool till sep-15 where it took a break till around the 27th. Then all was cool till dec-15 and pop it wanished again. Made a one day visit on the 27th, and then 2 days around the 16 this month and it's gone back on the beach. The 15 and 27 dates seem to be critical days... like now, that site of mine is not back, so see ya till next month around the 15th... well thats the pattern I see since this summer. The fun thing is this vanishing is exactly like a Florida update but just for that site.
I meet almost same problem, today's visits from google will be double or only half of yesterday, ranking is up and down every day. I just see it as google dancing, and keep working on SEO and wait for the next update.
This seems more like a drunken twist than a regular Google dance. Going over a few things, I discovered something that was most interesting. The sitemap file that I had created using GSite Crawler seems to have been hosed by Google. About 1/3 of the links were gone, including some of the links that generated the top keyphrases for Google searches. A few days ago, I also came across a sitemap file from another site that had it's timestamp changed to a much earlier date (about a month prior) from when it was last uploaded and submitted. Seems like the bot is a**-raping sitemap files during these updates, or at the very least, that is what it is looking like. Anyway, I recreated the sitemap, resubmitted it to Google and it was re-downloaded a short time ago. We'll see what happens, both traffic-wise and file-wise. So, if those of you who are having the same problems and use a sitemap, you might want to check to see what the GoogleBot may have done to it. Sigh......looks like we are now truly in the heady days of MS-Google.