This is an odd one. I started a new stock discussion forum 6 months ago and one of my forums is for Blackberry at: http://www.alphabanter.com/forum/bbry. According to Google Webmaster, it was ranking on average at 10th position for the search term "bbry forum" for roughly all of March (BBRY is the stock ticker for Blackberry). Before March, the forum would rank at the 4th position on average for the search term "rimm forum" (RIM or Research in Motion changed its company name to Blackberry about two months ago). However, approximately 2 weeks ago, my Blackberry forum falls out of the Google rankings hard. "bbry forum" no longer brings up my forum page. Even more puzzling, when I type in the search term "bbry forum alphabanter", I would expect my Blackberry forum to rank high since that is a very specific search term that should match highly with my forum. Instead, this ranks around 20th! I am at a loss here. The only thing I can think of is that I had a poor click through rate (CTR) for this forum in Google Webmaster. But it's almost like my page is being penalized by Google now - "bbry forum alphabanter" should rank top 5 because it is very specific to my page, IMO. Any ideas on what happened? I have few backlinks to my Blackberry forum but I don't expect it to go from 10 to practically unranked overnight.
I did a quick SEO evaluation on your site, and I think I may have found the source of the issue you are describing. Click on these images to view them larger If you have any further questions, or concerns, feel free to let me know... Kind Regards!
If I do a search in g I see your site in fourth position. I have been looking at several different keywords every day for months and I am seeing huge changes in the results of the sites from 4th to 20th on a daily basis for the last several weeks. Its as if G is rotating the sites to see which one gets the best numbers. In IMO I think G creating the whole backlink thing was a bad idea and doing a some rotation at the bottom of the page could in fact allow them to find the sites that are really engaging users. I hope for you they have stopped the shuffling and your site has won fourth position :+)
My site is still less than 2 weeks old at this point It went right to the top, after I posted 1 article about the site on the blog on my personal site. (also linked in my signature) I did not do any external SEO, I did spend about 40 hours doing internal SEO work on the site. Very large sites that are optimized well internally, don't need much external SEO to do well... My site has around 2,000 pages and each time you visit any page, it looks differently because of the way the link listing rotate throughout the directory. A few days ago I made a VERY SHORT LIST of Keyword phrases that I found my site is doing well for. Keep in mind I made this list when the site was only about a week old, which was last week. This is not too bad for the first time this site was indexed at Google