I'm being penalised by Google and I have no idea why. Traffic dropped by around 75% 2-3 weeks ago. The website in question is http://www.doyouremember.co.uk I play by the rules, don't sell links and have made no major changes to the site in the last few months except for modifying page titles slightly. This happened once before back at the end of last year (mid December 07). Traffic went up and down for a few days and then settled at a really low rate for about 3 or 4 months. Then, without warning, it jumped back up again at the beginning of April and I thought everything was fixed. Then mid-June the traffic started jumping around again before settling at a really low amount on July 9th where it has stayed ever since. What is going on? What am I doing wrong? Why does Google hate me? Here is a screenshot of my traffic
I beleive google as issued a press release about targetting you specifically 3 weeks ago. Really? Google is not targetting anyone in particular. They just change their rules as they want.
I experienced the same problem with some of my sites... there was some sort of crazy tweak to the Google algo I'm assuming. First I thought it was a major Google Dance (started June 26) and I just had to wait till it settled down... Now it's July 30 and I'm off my vacation and some sites are still in the toilet. Doing some major "investigating" on what exactly happened. Actually just spent the last 3 hours doing research/website tweaking.
That actually is not a lot of reciprocal links so it is not a link farm. The only way that could negatively affect him is if he has more reciprocals links then one-way links pointing to his site.
Only Google can answer your questions... May be the other site(your competitor) may have done some Good SEO
I experienced the same problem with some of my blogs for last 1 month.All my traffic from Google search dropped
Sad but just for Google algorithm ridding off those jumpers beyond TOS and guidelines, other sites who didn't do anything wrong just suffer.
Hmmm.. maybe it's just some major shift in the SERP's. You might have wait a while before you can go raving about this. . Someone may have just dominated the niche you run
I don't believe that Google is "directly" targeting you because as we know, Google's Algo has been "a secret' and "changing" thats why we experience fluctuations, low traffic, etc.
OK the thread title was meant to be tongue in cheek, I know that Google isn't out get me specifically (although I did see a couple of guys wearing Google shirts parked in a black sedan parked outside my house in the middle of the night looking at me with binoculars). So the only suggestion I'm picking up here is that I have too many reciprocal links. I'll try dropping the links page and concentrate on getting organic links. What about my page titles? Could that have been anything to do with it? I changed my titles a few weeks ago from: "<keyword> 80s Toys and games" to "<keyword> : 80s Toys : Buy vintage <keyword> stuff" Would that count as keyword stuffing and get me penalised? Gotta go - the Google guys are back outside...