One of my sites (about 10 years online) has increased in PR from 3 to 5 over the past year, but daily google hits have come down from 30k to just about 6k daily. First I thought it had possibly to do with seo, so I did remove meta keyword tags on most pages and voila: google traffic was back. However, after 3 or 4 days Google traffic went down to 6k again. Any clue if the traffic drop could be related to a penalty due to whatever reasons?
I think It is off site SEO issue. May be you get good PR backlinks so you get PR5 from PR3 but I think those backlinks are not niche related so you didn't get SERP increased.
Most links are niche oriented one-way links and reciprocal link exchanges. I don't actually do any offsite SEO as I do get a lot of incoming links from fans of my site.
if you pay for any links, or take recprocal ones, then this could be affecting you, getting high pr lnks can look unnatural to google if you dont get low pr, also the anchor text on the links is so so important. You need to tend to the links and see i thse have unrelated anchor texts. If they dont then you need to concern your self with onsite information
Yes, keyword competition increased, but I was number 1 for many very competitive terms for 5 years and longer on Google. It's not that I lost search position from 1 to 5 or 15, but it drop down to 50 or 80 or even worse. Most other sites listed on top are very new sites containing keywords inside their domain name without any relevant links. That's what puzzles me and it makes me think Google gave me some sort of penalty.
Well, check out your google ranking against different keywords... n see if you have dropped the ranking or what ...