Google rankings dropped like a stone

[JamesBSEO]

I've heard of this happening many times, but never to me. My client was Page 1 or 2 for 20 phrases, and they ALL dropped like a rock overnight. The site hasn't been banned by Google, as it's still indexed and the company name is returning results.There were no major changes done to tags or the code, and nothing black hat has been done. The only phrases that didn't drop contain the company name, and the results in Bing and Yahoo either stayed the same or moved up slightly since last week for all the terms. There's also no threat of spam, and it's very search engine friendly. The URL is http://www.universalaccounting.com. Help!

[BlastAM]

My guess is it it due to the content.  I did a quick search for the first sentence on the home page content: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=%22Starting+a+business+is+usually+thought+of+as+something+that+takes+lots+of+money+and+carries+lots+of+risks.%22

It looks like there are MANY sites using the same content.  It appears that Google really dislikes content that is duplicated nowadays.  The same thing happened to one of my sites. There were some spammers that grabbed our content and our rankings fell.  Create some new original content and your rankings should come back.

[Cyle]

What are some of the terms that dropped?  I see your site ranking #8 for Bookkeeping courses in Google.

[JamesBSEO]

This post is deleted!

[JamesBSEO]

Good catch. This is our original content, which has been scraped by several other sites. I'll suggest this to the client ASAP. Thanks.

[BoulderJoe]

Hey James, don't forget the Wild, Wild, West is not a static lab environment.

How old is your site?

What has changed with your competitors - look specifically at any new entries into the top ten and try and determine why they might have moved up to replace you.

Any server/page load speed issues?

It is supposed to be an algorithm, but I doubt there is a single person (probably by design) that has any clue what it really is doing and barely what is supposed to be doing

It could be a million different things - is your dev sub-directory blocked from crawling, did some high quality comment links get archived, did some of your quality links go away, did someone you are linking to get whacked or go away, etc, etc

Are the pages that dropped still ranking for other terms - i.e. was it a "surgical drop" that I have experienced on another site of mine that I'm still trying to figure out.

Just do an audit of everything and keep doing quality things... and theoretically, as we tell ourselves, your rankings should come back.

Finally, were your ranking drops in the 10-50, 200+, or 950 range?  The smaller ones are supposedly algorithmic and "easier" to correct while the higher ones are manually and "time out" once the offense has been corrected - all kind of witch craft

Good luck.