Woah, my A-grade optimized pages that were on the first page have all vanished outside the top 50 in Google... is this Panda?

[Switch_Digital]

Yep as mentioned, I had some pages hit the top ten pretty quickly after ensuring they were A-grade for pretty uncompetitive keywords however, today, all bar 2 have just vanished from the top 50!

All were ranking in Google.co.uk and I know we were predicting the Panda update to hit soon but WOW!

My client is understandably a little upset, what on earch do I tell him and what should I do about it?

Cheers!

jT

[Tom-Anthony]

A few questions:

Were the pages new pages? If so how long were they in the top 10 for? I'm wondering if Google was just taste-testing them to measure CTR etc.

What sort of content is on the pages? Has anything changed in terms of inbound links recently?

[Switch_Digital]

Yes they were new pages for an eCommerce site, some had products, others were just landing pages for longtail searches.

They managed to get into the top ten with no backlinks at all, which surprised me. They have been in that position for a couple of months.

[division1]

I did some experiments with new websites and could bring them to first page but then the dropped quite a bit. Most likely it is some sort of spike which I've read about. It does happen sometime with some of our older websites too.
please make sure that you are not logged in in your google account it might change results.

[Switch_Digital]

Yea I suspect it was an initial spike.

I monitor rankings within SEOmoz pro, so my Google login isn't impacting.

[Tom-Anthony]

I've not heard of the spike lasting a couple of months before - more like a few days. Maybe the factor that you mentioned, that they are low-traffic keywords, played into this. Interesting.

[Switch_Digital]

Problem solved, well, more like diagnosed!

Although the pages were A grade optimised, filters on the page (i.e. sort by high price, low price, new products) were seen as duplicate pages as the CMS would take the static page and add some dynamic content for the filter. Rel Canonical has sorted it, but we shall see next time Google updates.