There's been a major reshuffle going on, and a site of mine seems to have dropped position from page 1 , 2 for a well used search term (which it had held for a year or so) to about 200th! Lol. Just goes to show - I hadn't put much effort into it for some time and had almost assumed it would never move. Bad assumption, and of course traffic has dropped by almost half. In this case I'm almost thankful - it was aimed at high end art dealers who NEVER used ads (partly because ads truly targeted at this sector just weren't really available), but instead used to inundate me with mail enquiries they rarely followed up. Lol. But still - the importance of plugging those sites is clearer to me than ever. AND just how terrifying it must be if you're very dependent on Google traffic for your livelihood. And on that note - I'm noticing MASSIVE discrepancies between Google's indexing and Yahoo / MSN. Does anyone have any real clue as to how the criteria differ? Any links or resources anyone could recommend?
I've noticed this recently too, quite a few of my serp rankings have completely disappeared, back to where it began. Gutted like a fish
You need to continually build backlinks and add fresh content. Get a top 10 ranking is hard but holding that position is even harder. Just think of all the webistes competing for the same keyword phrase you are. They are building backlinks hard and fast to take your spot so you need to do the same to maintain it.
Google has seemed strange for a few weeks, on page one, then gone completley, sometimes in a matter of an hour or so. European servers have been stable. Overall traffic is almost identical day to day regardless for some reason. Weird.