I recently contacted an organizer for a large summer festival because it so happened that I ranked well for his main keyword and was getting increased traffic because of it. We were going to work out a partnership but I have never heard back a week later, AND my Google rankings dropped from #2 to #70. I have heard of hired hands to take out websites before but cannot find info easily to see if this is what has happened. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Still no luck... How would it be possible to go from #2 to #72 overnight? The web promotion for this site has never been "shady". Is it possible to affect competitors sites the way my site has been affected? Any ideas would be greatly appreciated, Thanks.
Do a backlink search to see if someone got you lots of links from "bad neighborhoods..." go to Yahoo and type in linkdomain:www.yoursite.com to get a rough idea of what's going on backlink wise. Also you might want to do some research on the concept of the "google bomb" which is a nefarious strategy people can use to defeat competitors - usually it involves spamming the search engines on behalf of your site and getting bad backlinks from porn sites, etc. Look around a bit to see if you can see what is happening. Also remember it's always possible that Google is going through an update and your positions could return to normal soon - I hope that's the case for your sake! Dan
How long have you had this ranking? It's possible that you are just getting results from a different Google data center today. Usually it takes a while for rankings to update across all data centers. If you don't vary your link anchor text enough, it is easy enough to get a penalty that knocks you 5 or 6 pages back.