From page 1th to page 18th @ Google

[socialengaged]

Hello Mozzers!

I have a question, you may help.. How may it be possible that a page ranking well (1th result) goes from 1th result to the 18th page just in 1 day? It doesnt seem to be any kind of penalization.. I now had all suspicious outgoing links to be nofollow (they were not before), this may be a cause .. (?) Do you have any other suggestion? Thanks

[dotfly]

well, I don`t think that there is just one clear answer for that but I do not really understand why you have suspicious outgoing links on a site?

First of all nobody would link to a site which might be suspicious and if there is a development, that a site becomes suspicious for whatever I would just remove the link.

There are good reasons to use nofollow but imagine the following scenario:

if you have links on your site and the most or even all of them are "nofollow" Google will ask itself the question "why does this site link to other sites with "nofollow"? Does this site don`t trust these links? So why should we do?

This is a strange and suspicious behaviour and might lead to a penalty - manually or automatically along within an update...

[webmethod]

Hi,

Assuming that no changes were made to the page content, I would see if the drop happened around the time of a Google algorithm change by using a free tool like Fruition: http://fruition.net/google-penalty-checker-tool/.

It's also worth looking at the page's backlink profile (Open Site Explorer) as any spammy links acquired may have caused the problem.

I would be surprised if simply adding nofollows to some outbound links would have such a drastic impact on your ranking.

George

@methodicalweb