Hi, I launched 2 months ago a lyrics site. There are totally 100,000 pages indexed by Google, I used no black hat technique and I built a friendly site. My ranking kept on increasing and till yesterday, Google sent me daily around 3000 visitors. The visitors used long keywords or descriptions to reach my site, so nothing special and no hard-fought terrain. There were maybe around 500-5000 results for those search terms at all. Well since yesterday, the Google traffic decreased dramatically (600 visitors). I did a short check and I have seen that my site is no longer listed for the search terms, ie. I had position 2 for a term, now I can find my site on result #750. So my subpages do no longer rank for any keyword combination where you would definitely say "oh yeah, that page must be on page 1 for that words". Funnily enough, Google still crawls my site. When typing the domain name (also with www and TLD), with and without quotes, it's still ranked on the first position. A site:www.mydomain.com research also shows that all pages are still indexed. I am a bit clueless. I know such prognoses are always hard, but what could be the reason for the drop? Is it a penalty? Or just a temporary drop and the site will be back in a few days? Would be nice if someone could make a guess
Probably a drop.... just be patient.... if in a week or two you are still low, it may be a penalty. Since it is a brand new site, it may be the sandbox effect (search google for it) and then it may be longer than just a week or two.
I was thinking the same thing with the Sandbox idea (as mentioned above)... if it's a new domain as well, that could be bad news for instant ranking :0
PR update underway. We've seen major PR movement on our sites (down) : July 26th 2008 CST Dallas TX USA SERPs have moved up though????
Same problem here too. It all started yesterday. You can see this thread. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=8644654
Wow, guys, i think this has been a major update in the google's algorithm because the sites I have worked on dropped PR by 1 to 2 points but the interesting thing is that the Alexa rating got better. I am building links the white hat way and this can be sandbox effect because when google penalizes sites, the site is moved to like 6th or 7th page of the SERPs. Please tell me if I am wrong... Thanks!
same thing with me. i was getting about 2000 a day and now its down to 1500 how ever my site is fairly new as well
Google has been doing this with newer sites for a while, just do not panic. I have produced a cruise related site for a client, that is still only site under 2 years old in top 50 for their main search term. This site drops, comes back higher, drops, comes back higher etc etc. The site is a cruise holidays website, based in the UK.