Can literally any site get 'burned'?

[astahl11]

Just curious what people think.  The SEOMOZ trust on my site has gone up, all while Google is dropping us in rankings for lots of keywords.

Just curious if this can happen to anyone or once you are 100% 'trusted' you're good.

We went from 120,000 page views down to about 50,000.   All while doubling content, improving the design(at least from a user perspective), and getting more natural links.

Seems counter intuitive to Google's mantra of ranking quality.

I would guess 'authority' sites never get hit by these updates right?  So when you make it you've made it.(at least from a dropping like a rock perspective, obviously you have to keep working).

I'm guessing we just need a bunch more quality links but would hate to work on building links, quality content, trust etc for it to be something so finicky long term.

[bronxpad]

From my experience I see that every site no matter how big or small is vulnerable. I'm a Realtor and my focus is to get that coveted top spot on page 1. Currently I'm in the number 7 spot for one of my main keywords and for other keywords I'm high on page 1 or on page 2.

Now who is on top? the national brands. But even they get impacted because they compete against each other and for some terms I beat them in the SERPS. I use Long Tail Keywords in order to do this.

Now, Google is fine tuning their search bots and there will of course be movement up and down for some sites. The thing to remember is to make sure you focus on the long term.

1. Great Content
2. Blog
3. Social Media
4. Ease of use for your web visitor
5. On Page SEO
6. Natural Link building
7. Infographics
8. Video
9. Off Line Marketing
10. SEO Continuing Education

[lethal0r]

i think any site can take a hit. it doesn't have to be a punishment, even just a minor tweak to the algo could knock a page down a ranking or two. that alone could be thousands of visitors. or maybe the tweak makes a competitor rank better and puts them above you.

[EGOL]

I see NASA.gov being beaten for quotes from their own content - sometimes even a quote of their title tag.  So many people scrape their content or republish it verbatim.

A city newspaper near me had a lot of pages of crappy content.  They simply posted a page for every business around with biz name, phone address and couple other pieces of info.  These were really skinny pages.  Their rankings have been in the dumps and I think these skinny pages are the reason.