I have checked the traffic record of my site about the google search of last year, and i found that my SERP for some competitive keywords has dropped greatly now, even not found at google. Instead, the words which bring my site the traffic now are some words more specific and strange. For instance, the previous keywords which brought me great traffic is "coupons, best buy coupons", but now it has changed to some strange and cold words as " coupons for 7th generation automatic dishwasher soap ", etc. I just wonder what happened to my site. Has it been penalized by google? Besides, i found that a countable traffic is from the goolge image search, but this didn't show up in the previous traffic record, When the google's image search is lauched?
I've noticed this too. I think it might have to do with their attempts to combat g bombing. I was really confused because my ranks in google did not seem to change - at least at my data center. The sites that I noticed this on are now starting to show traffic on the targeted keywords again.
G**gle bombing - manufacturing many backlinks to a site with the targetted keywords to gain an advantaged position on G__gle. The most famous example is when users on several forums created several links George Bush's site with the keyword "miserable failure" which resulted in it being ranked #1 for the term. An innocent example was adobe being ranked #1 for "click here" on it's acrobat download page. ps. don't bump your own thread - you'll get an infraction.