What the heck is wrong with Google lately?

I have been experiencing some weird issues lately. I am in a highly competitive niche. I know that with niche like mine, things change and sometimes are a bit difficult to deal with but what I have observed is Google acting very very weird. How? Here is my take on it.

First, my website used to rank very high for some extremely competitive keywords. I then lost all my rankings and was pushed down to page 14. Earlier I used to rank #2 for major keywords. I didn't buy links or did any blackhat seo. I have mainly focused on links from blogs, directories, social bookmarking, article distribution and on-page optimization. I got back to page 1 after 6 months and today, all of a sudden, my site is on page 27 and 31 for the same keywords I recently got back to page 1. I optimized my site for some brand new less competitive keywords and gained rankings on page 1 but now, I am either not ranking for those terms as high as I was or some of my search pages are appearing on page 1 instead of the page I optimized to rank on Google. Also, my site appears on page 2 if I search via my toolbar which takes me to a different datacenter but when I search it on Google USA (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&q=my+keywords) the site appears on page 30 or more. Using search.comcast.net or search.aol.com displays my site amongst top 10 and top 20.

Most of the sites that rank high buy links on both major websites, forums etcetera. Some sites even buy links on News websites with hundreds and thousands of pages indexed in Google. My niche is not at all related to News so that makes it totally irrelevant to buy links on sites that are not even related to yours. What I am trying to say is that, my competitors buy links on a lot of sites while I don't. I am fine with that as long as it doesn't climb up my ass.

I have seen weird results lately. Searching for my main keyword used to yield around 7 million results. Currently, it's showing 7,170,000 and sometimes it shows 479,000. Sometimes it displays 6 million results and then suddenly it would jump to 10 million results or even more.

I have also seen crappy results and by crap, I mean crap. TOTALLY irrelevant pages. For my second major keyword, the results keep changing from 20 million down to 16 million.

At any given rate, Google keeps acting weird. My site keeps jumping all over the place and I can not think of any reason as I have not really update my site's content because it was doing well and was gaining back its results. I know links matter but I can not buy links like my competitors do.

I believe Google is also updating it's PR as some of the categories in my sites have gained PR and some have lost some PR. It's not settled yet it seems.

Is anyone else facing these problems? What I have experience is that if I loose my rankings on Google USA then it also drops elsewhere. I am sure that my site will also disappear from search.aol.com or search.comcast.net soon.

It can not be Google dance as I have been seeing this trend for more than 4 months now and it's not going anywhere. People talk about algorithms changing but they can't change algo every other day? Somehow it feels that optimizing for Google is become more and more difficult and blurry. You can't really take one approach or come up with a proper strategy anymore as everything has become so very unpredictable. Also, at any given rate, it seems that Google is not what it used to be which was pretty solid with results and such issues didn't use to surface every other day.

Please share your views and if you can, please give me a proper advice. Perhaps I am just frustrated? Any help in this regard would be highly appreciated.

Thanks,
z

 

i am in the same problem, i cannot understand google at all, it seems there is no any roll by which google is acting. all my pages were very high in results they seem to drop now but they are not banned, they are still fully indexed.
please look at my traffic details lately:


Do you have any idea what is happening here?

 

It is good to vent sometimes ... I wouldnt get too worked up yet... I have heard that PR may be updating and if that is the case there is a small chance the SERP changes may be temporary... I wish you the best of luck though. Dont get discouraged, keep working hard!

 

Yes, I would love to VENT but that's not what I am doing here. Even though it may seem that I am venting but I am not. I just want to understand what others think about this. How many people are facing this issue and is there a way to work around this thing?

Thank you for your encouragement and wishes though

 

I could not agree with you more

I have been bumped down recently for sites on geocities domains that does not even exist anymore

there isn't even a friggin site there or anything

 

I've seen the same thing.. My blog was on the first, second and third pages for certain variations of key words and now it's completely gone for 3 of my long tails(only listed in top 5 pages from book marks now). But it has moved up for one of them to the second page! from not even being there before... I did notice however that the word in one of my "Long tail keywords" (that got me to the second page) in my url (from nowhere) was not even in my header! I wasn't even trying to move up for that long tail...And now it's on the second page?

For example:
(just an example)
key word focus- build a bird house
Header- How to build a bird house
url- ways-to-build-a-bird-h0use.bl0gspot

Long tails

how to build a bird house
build a bird house
Build bird house
ways to build bird house


For long tails:
how to build a bird house
build a bird house
Build bird house <<<< My blog has moved out completly except for a propeller or blog catolog listing

Now for

long tail- ways to build bird house

It's on the second page from nowhere!!!!
Doesn't make sense..

Be glad to know if anyone can figure this out..I was thinking the same thing.. maybe url is more important now?

 

Similar situation for me - massive dive in google traffic about 4 months ago, now rankings are all over the place and vary by the minute, in each case rankings are much lower than before.

I know there's a problem with the site being penalized but am not sure quite why.

When I search for KEYWORD + mysite.com, my website no longer appears whereas it used to. This is how I know that some kind of penalty has been applied (eg. so if mysite.com is about shoes, and I were to search shoes + mysite.com - it doesn't appear at the top where it should do - instead sites linking to me do).

Similar situation for anyone else?

 

I will also agree. There has been some really unusual traffic drop from google in the past few days. Some times, I see the same ranking for different keywords, but the traffic still drops.

 

I have 3 same theme sites - so a funny thing happened to 2 of them. One of them lost 200 uniques per day while the other gained 100 approximately the same day. What a strange shuffle. Thing are still this way...

 

google > the internets

 

You mentioned you get lots of links from blogs - were these comment spam?

 

There is absolutely something happened to Google. I am experiencing the same problem too. My analytics only shows a fluctuating graph.