A huge drop in rankings since last 10 days, and not recovered yet.

[ValSmith]

Hi Mozzers,

I have a serious topic to discuss and want help from the experts here.

Our website has 6 PR and we have been consistency staying at the top for very competitive terms in the niche.

Since last Friday (24th February, 2012) we have been facing massive fluctuation in the rankings for most of the keywords we are focusing on. After this fall, we checked the following details but didn’t find any serious/critical issue that might be contributing towards these fluctuations:-

1. We analyzed Google webmaster tools, there’s no update/warning from Google regarding any negative activity and other things seem to be normal.
2. We checked our website through site search (site: www.domain.com) and found that we haven’t lost any indexed pages and things appear normally as they used to. So, we are sure that we haven’t been banned or penalized.
3. We also cross verified our link building and other promotional activities and we didn’t find anything suspicious that could lead to such a big fluctuation.

The drop is really big, some keywords went to 5th or 6th page from top 3 position; some keywords are not in top 200 or 300 spots which were usually staying put between 5th to 10th position. We have analyzed a lot but haven’t come to know the reason why we are facing this fluctuation.

Our website is 4 years old and this kind of fluctuation has happened for the first time.

Has anyone faced this kind of issue before?

I’m looking forward to your support in identifying this trouble.

Thanks

[soltec]

Hi Mark,

A couple of suggestion to check:

• Long load times of pages during Google’s last crawl.
• Pages with poor content on bring the whole site down – caused by recent Google updates

Hope these help.

K

[Highland]

Unless you're mega-popular (like Amazon, Wal-Mart, etc), I would expect things like this from time to time.

I tend to find that precipitous drops are due to a shift in algorithms. You might be going "well duh", but it's important to note that an algorithm change can cause shifts like this on a temporary basis while either the indexation process catches up or Google evaluates a set of changes (internally or by using quality evaluators). My bet is it's the latter since Google announced they rolled out a lot of new changes (which is not something Google does on a regular basis). That, to me, screams "testing" (remember that Panda did the same thing to a lot of sites about 1 year ago). Eventually the SERPs return to "normal".

That having been said, are you sitting still? If so, that's not going to help you in the long run. Add links and content. Keep up with your competitors. Remember, they want to sell your products as much as you do.