Massive drop off in my google rank. Why?

[FPK]

Hi recently I've noticed a steep drop in my google ranks for a couple of my sites. I was at 2 then I fell to so that I'm not even in the top 50. Can anyone help explain the massive decrease?

[MalcolmGibb]

Sorry about your drop in rankings, it can be frustrating when this happens but I think you'll have to give us a bit more information to try and discover why your rankings dropped. Have you had a look at your backlinks? You may have had a drop off in the number of links pointing at your site, particularly low quality article/directory links that Google is devaluing.

Have you changed any content? Had a look at your robots.txt file and make sure nothing is no-indexed? You need to have a look at all these things before jumping to a conclusion.

[TheeDigital]

I agree with everything that Malcolm said.  Remember that Google has released massive updates so far in 2012 in Panda/Penguin that are designed to devalue some links, that us web-owners had previously gotten.
This could be at the root of your problem.

[FPK]

Ok so I took a look at my backlinks and noticed that I'm missing over 200 that were there Friday but aren't there now. That could be a problem.

[FPK]

Ok so I took a look at my backlinks and noticed that I'm missing over 200 that were there Friday but aren't there now. That could be a problem.

[MalcolmGibb]

If you used seomoz to look at the links then you may notice that there are 200 fewer links because of the recent updates to the mozscape. It contained far fewer domains than the last index update so link profiles look naturally smaller because of this.

There is the other case though that these 200 links have been lost which means less juice flowing to your site and lower ranking as a result. You probably need to diversify your link strategy. What kind of links did you lose? Were these directory links, blogroll links?

[KeriMorgret]

As Malcolm said, it's most likely the recent Mozscape update that came out Friday evening. That index was about half the size of the previous index, so a lot of your links could not be showing.