I use the SEO tools here at Digital Point to monitor a list of around 40 keywords for my e-commerce site. Not all rank, but most do. Yesterday, while looking at Analytics, I noticed a pretty big drop off in traffic. This morning I was greeted by a host of -9986 when doing my keyword check. Not everything dropped completely off... but 98% did. Of course this made me crap my pants. We average a few sales a day, and yesterday it was ZERO. Google webtools doesn't show anything out of the ordinary, and my PR is showing the same as it has for awhile now. I still am showing up in site: and my sitemaps are being downloaded by google. It still shows a good portion of my sitemap as being indexed. I have done a few things in the last month or so to try and boost PR, nothing "black hat" (I think/hope). The most grey thing I did was submit to a few "SEO friendly" search directories I found at info.vilesilencer.com. I didn't do many (3 or 4). Should I be worried? Is there a way to know for sure what has happened? Is this normal Google Insanity? Any advice/comments would be most welcome.
Well... for anyone who cares... 12 hours later things are almost back to normal. A slight dropoff in some SERPs, but not too bad. I really can't believe how capriciously Google handles things, considering the number of people who are almost completely dependent on them for their survival.
I've seen weird stuff since the recent tweaks they did. Some of it was good and some of it wasn't. We'll see what happens.