Weird - google punishing part of my site

I am pretty experienced in SEO and my pages rank great. I have a website that has main page ranking first or second for many good keywords. I did a bit of link building for main page.

The website has a subpage that also ranked extremly well for a lot of nice keywords (different than main page).

Two days ago that sub page slipped down about 10-20 positions for all keywords it ranked (it ranked first or second for most of them before). Ranking for home page did not change.

I never did any seo or link buying/exchanging for that subpage. What could happen? This has happned to me before, but I shoot back up to higher position in less than 24 hours. Now the bad position holds.

Could it be that competition did anything?? A lot of people want that position. I didn't change anything on subpage or got any new links (that I know of).

Any ideas, this is really strange.

 

when did that happen? You might just need to give G a little more time to index you back up.

 

happned over 2 days ago.

why would such a thing happen anyway just out of the blue?

according to my experience such a thing can hapen for this reasons (has happned to me before):

1. you add a lot of external links to website
2. remove some pages of the website, so google gets 404 when he trys to read again

This is 2 occations I have already had and I lost some rankings, but remember I didn't do ANYTHING now

 

I am not in 11th position for most keywords (first on page 2). This is really veird, like google is punishing me for something

any ideas???

 

have you checked google webmaster tools/google cache? maybe your hosting was out when google crawled.

How long since you updated the site? perhaps the content is getting old?

 

I call it the Google Dance. I wouldn't worry too much about it yet, with Google constantly updating their algorithms this is something we often see. If you have held those good positions for a length of time you will likely bounce back up and more than likely it doesn't have anything to do with anything you did.

 

It's either the google dance or there is more competition for the keywords you are targeting.

 

Jason you have changed any content or title of the page ? You may like to read my post (just wrote few days back) about this.

I have written it from my personal experience and from various clients websites as I have seen lot of ups and down in serps. I know its hard (losing rankings always make everyone uncomfortable) but if you haven't done anything than the only thing you can do is to wait and watch. Do keep us updated on this though...

 

ok, I came back, it was just google dance. But it lasted 14 days, so it was much longer than usually