Sudden drop of homepage of old/trusted site - Any suggestions?

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by spycraft, Feb 15, 2011.

  1. #1
    Hello all,

    First of all, let me define what I mean when I say old/trusted site. I have had this site for about a year - so it's not that old, but old enough. Through that year, and after putting a LOT of work on it, it was climbing up the ranks really quickly. The site had achieved several top spots on Google, and 100s of first page rankings.

    It was a fashion site that was targeting a main keyword for which it climbed up to the first page, and I was getting some very good traffic from it. The reason I say that it was trusted, is that for every new keyword I mentioned in new content, I would get a decent ranking - almost instantly.

    The site continued to get higher for all its keywords for the past 6 months and at some point after an update, all of my rankings increased, and it got to the 5th spot for the main keyword. The traffic was off the roof.

    A few weeks later (which brings us to the beginning of Feb), all the rankings dropped, and the homepage that was ranking 5th for the main keyword was down to 300th. One of my random inner pages was actually at the 150th spot (higher than the homepage). A couple of days after that happened, everything came back to normal, so I assumed that it was just a Google Dance.

    About 5 days after the incident, the same thing happened, and it has been like that ever since. The homepage has either dropped SUBSTANTIALLY for all of the keywords, and is not even ranking for some others. However, I still see some random inner pages ranking very low for some of these keywords.

    Now, I have been doing SEO for over 5 years and I own more than 100 sites, so at this point I feel like I've seen a lot of stuff happen, but I guess I still have a lot to learn and I would really appreciate some advice.

    I did not do any extensive link building recently which could have caused this to happen. My link building efforts have been very linear throughout the creation of the site.

    Can you think of anything that I could do? The site is getting almost no traffic for the past 2 weeks and I have tried building more links, adding new content.... everything I could think of.

    Please don't just tell me to keep building links. I know that and I will. The question is what could have possibly caused this to happen and how can I work through it to get my rankings back.

    Any help would be really appreciated.

    Thank you!
     
    spycraft, Feb 15, 2011 IP