Our web store is hosted by Yahoo and has been online for years. We’ve always ranked well in Y! and Google... our MSN rankings have been steadily improving. According to the Keyword Tracker (and recent traffic), something happened on June 8th. We took a slam from MSN and a MAJOR slam from Yahoo!. And have not recovered. Since March of 2005, keywords that were ranking 1st to 40th with Y! are now off the charts. And it’s not just one or two keywords… all but four keywords I track rank 9,999th or lower. MSN isn’t quite as severe… words that had ranked 1st to 5th have dropped to the mid 60’s. There've been almost zero changes to the site. The only thing I know I did recently was adding Adsense to our link pages on May 17th. For the most part, Google hasn't changed… we have some keywords that are volatile day to day, but they seem to settle back where they were. Anyone have a clue?
Did you get a huge burst of links to your site? If you got a large amount of backlinks all at once, that could make your site drop like a rock.
I've submitted to a few different directories but not more than 4 or 5 per month. Y! has still not recovered... only 5 of the keywords I track rank and they're 20th to 138th.
I think Yahoo has bee working on an update. I have seen shifts in the rankings and the Slurp has hit one site of mine over 22,000 times in the last 7 days.