I have noticed a good number of threads in recent days regarding the current "google dance". I have about 40 sites that I track fairly closely and I can tell you for sure that something is certainly going on with Google over the past few weeks. In many threads people ask why their SERPS are changing or dropping. All too often I see a curt answer by someone like "Get more backlinks" or "You site is too new - it's normal". I can attest to the fact that websites both new and old are being affected. For instance, I have a 5 year old PR5 website with many PR3-5 inner pages. I have slowly been building traffic to this site over the last few years. For the past six months it has gotten anywhere between 3600 to 4200 unique visitors per day. During this google dance I have seen unique visitors fluctuate between 1800 to 6500 uniques per day. Mind you, for the last 6 months I have never had a day fall out of the 3600 to 4200 range. I have had my worst day in years followed immediately by my best day ever. I have noticed a trend. On days my established sites do poorly, my newer sites in the same niche seem to do double or triple the normal traffic. I think this is why so many people are reporting huge traffic increases or losses. It almost seems like the Big G is doing experiments with increasing or decreasing the value of site age. Another trend I have noticed is that even though your serps may tank one day they will likely come back soon. I wouldn't get too concerned about a traffic loss of a few days or so... Just as I wouldn't get too excited about a two day traffic surge. Now I guess I will just wait for everyone to tell me to build more backlings and improve onpage SEO!
Yeah I haven't on all my sites either, but the ones that I have it really is chaos. I wasn't really writing this to people who weren't having SERP flux - was more to the people who were.
I have noticed the same thing. It seems like Google is making changes and doing experiments, for example, the recent pagerank update.
I have experienced the same thing on one of my sites, I normally get about 16000/17000 uniques and I have been dropped for major keywords by more than 30 places, and my traffic has dropped to 13000. I have noticed that many pages in my sitemap are no longer listed, I had 240,000 pages indexed and I am down to about 80,000 and it continues to drop. My sites is about 5 years old. I am so fed up with google's crap! Especially when my competitors dont seem to have moved and most of their sites are just utter s**t! Google screwed me on a batch of my sites in march and they never recovered despite being the only sites in their field with real data not filler text to get traffic.
Man I am sorry to hear that Gazzerman. Hopefully things will calm down a bit and get back to some stability. 5+ year old sites should not be experiencing this kind of flux. My traffic seems like it is right in the middle so far today so maybe things are getting a little better. Yesterday was a bit down from normal though.
It happened to a few of my sites. And only in one of them did things got better, yet I ended up loosing about 30% of the traffic google used to send on that website alone.
I experienced a drop from #2 for my key phrase down to #11 (first spot on page 2) which has been a huge loss in traffic for me. This happened in the beginning of May. Now I'm back up, but only to #5 on page 1. I really hope they get things sorted out. Ironically enough, my site went from PR 1 to PR 3 in this last update, but my SERPs haven't restored back to normal.
i have noticed increase in SE traffic to my new site which recently got indexed and that too for a VERY VERY VERY competitive search term. I just got 10 visit for those. When I cheked in my google SERP I couldnt find my page!!! So I guess it is gone
Same happened to 2 of my sites, though one of my site has returned to normal. One is still dancing with google.. hope it comes back soon too
Dude you are just plain wrong. How can you say a 5 year old site, listed on Dmoz, with great rankings and ranking TOP 3 for every new page added, PR 6, can be considered new.
I am experiencing the exact same dilema. One site in particular, is eleven years old, PR5, completely white hat and all organic back linking. I have maintained a top ten position for two of my main keywords and top twenty for another for at least the last five or six years. Then, all of a sudden, my main keyword slipped into the top thirty. I started acquiring more back links and I think that helped a bit, it's now hovering around #15. Today my other main keyword dropped into the top thirty. One of my competitors, who has held the same positions as long as I have, has disappeared all together. That's what compelled me to come in here and see if anyone else is experiencing the same.