What Happened on the 17th?

[Freelancer13]

Alright, what gives? Something major with Google SERPs went down on Jan. 17th. I have a site that was ranking well for 7 keywords - normal fluctuations from page 1-3, for 8 months. We never had any issues with Panda/Penguin and in fact, Nov./Dec. were excellent months.

Then BAM, on the 17th all but 2 keywords tanked...not even in the top 100! 2 remain on page 2/3 - very odd....I've seen lots of talk about something happening...anyone have a better idea or even KNOW what happened?

Thank you!

[Brian-H]

Hi,

It looks like a penguin refresh. I've done a few site analysis so far. If you pm me your web address I'll perform one for you and let you know what I find.

Brian

[Freelancer13]

Hey there - I think we chatted in another thread Why wouldn't they mention this?? Hmmmm...

thanks for you help

[William.Lau]

There was another post on this on the 19th or so. There was some sort of update and traffic to a few of my sites are down as well.

[Freelancer13]

Interesting! Traffic isn't too bad - my guess is that's because we use cpc too and maybe the keywords that tanked didn't bring in much organic traffic anyway but some of my keywords went from #11 to #370!

[SAExplorer]

Same problem here! All white hat in-house SEO work with nothing changing on our end, and then a big drop in early-mid Jan. Haven't seen any Google updates though that would explain this...?

[Freelancer13]

It's frustrating - not because it happened, but because I don;t know WHAT happened and if I don't know what happened I can't fix it!

[David_H]

Barry Schwartz wrote about a new Panda update from Google, a couple of days ago...

http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-update-version-24-1-2-of-search-queries-impacted-146149

[Freelancer13]

Yes, I know about Panda...but this stuff happened on the evening of the 17th - we dropped like a rock./

[Freelancer13]

Brian, thank you for taking the time to call me and help me with this issue!

[SAExplorer]

Did you figure out what went wrong?

[Brian-H]

We had a few ideas but of all the site's I have seen this one had no big red flag saying here is the penalty.

If anyone else wants me to take a look I am happy to do so. The more I see the more I can find common cause however at the moment I have quite a few to get through as well as normal work so there may be a couple of days wait.

If you are interested pm me.

[Freelancer13]

With my site - no not yet. However, Brian did shed some light on the issue and was very helpful.

[Boodreaux]

My 2nd big key word dropped from #2 to 7-8 and now it is finally back up to two.  I was so excited to reach #2...when the fall happened I just thought well time to start doing more SEO.

[Freelancer13]

Oh this was/is major. I had one keyword go from # 8 to #480