This is a very common situation many webmasters experience. One day they are ranking top ten for many search phrases, and the very next day, they get dropped to the very LAST PAGE for EVERY search term imaginable. It probably is temporary, and some kind of penalty, but what are the known factors that result in getting pushed to the last page? here are some of my guesses: - New website....experienced good serps when first indexed, then pushed back to reality. - Duplicate content...if so..why would EVERY SERP be effected by this instead of the pages in question? - poor quality outbound links...Links on website that are innapropriate, unrelated...but wouldn't this cause a ban from googles index?
this happens to me every couple of weeks and then my site climbs right back up without me changing anything. So I don't think I'm getting dropped as a penalty seeing that I climb right back to where I was without changing anything.
interesting, couple of questions if you dont mind. how old is your site? approximatley.. How long do the drops last? and lastly, are you being dropped to the very laste page for EVERY SERP? thanks Ryan, looking to shed more light on this issue.
My sites about a year old the drop varies from a couple of days to maybe a week. And sometimes I get dropped to not being in the top 1000 results but usually into the 700-800 range Ryan
thats pretty strange for a site thats a year old, maybe you need to build up better back links for those keywords. my site is only a few weeks old so i guess its pretty normal.
this is called the google yo-yo serp. It's common and I have yet to read someone really explain the cause.
There are several things that cause this: 1) Different DC - You might see your SERPS drop but this is b/c you are hitting a different DC when doing the search. Google tends to test out ALGO tweaks all the time. 2) Trip A filter - If your site drops for a period of a few weeks to a month it's likely you tripped a filter. The most common reasons for tripping a filter are too many links to fast or too many links with the same anchor text. This happens often to sites that are under two years old. Sometimes when you trip a filter your site gets put in a que for a 'human review' so you may see it drop for a while but if the human review goes OK you will see your site appear again. Your best bet is to build links at a steady pace which will look more natural to the search engines. One other common thing that gives a red flag is adding pages... not a few pages but thousands at a time. If your site happens to add a few thousand pages in a short time... then your site might get flagged. There are other reasons but these are the more common ones.
Well one of my site got hit hard with too mcuh crosslinking and also lost PR and SERPs in the recent update I guess too much cross links could possibly be a sign of a link farm to the SERPs