Did Google change the algorithm?
I’m not sure but on Jan. 23rd 2008 something went wrong and a lot of my sites lost their hard gained Google rank for some competitive keywords.
One of them which was the 1st, can’t be found on first 5 pages now and most of the others also lost their rank significantly.
So what’s up?
My sites couldn’t get penalized because there is nothing wrong about them, also it can not be a result of a competition because they all went down in one day while they have no relation whatsoever. All I can think of is that the algorithm used by Google to sort the search results is changed and my site’s don’t do very well with the new algorithm.
I hope its temporary but if it’s really changed I have to consider some time to do research on the current top rank websites.
BTW, it will be much easier and more effective to analyze the result if I get some other samples beside my own, so if you’ve got similar stories with your site please share with us and together we can get into a new solution more quickly.
Again and as usual I’ll keep here updated so keep in touch.
Cheers,
Soroush
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My site dropped about 10 places, but that’s it. And it seems to do that periodically for a few days. I’m using RankTrend.com to make a graph of the rankings over time, and you can add in events for things like changing the content, etc. I dunno if there are any others that do this but it’s very useful to keep track of things. I was able to see that adding a paragraph to my page made the rankings plummet.
[...] my post here, I became so disappointed or better to say scared and thought I should start a new research while [...]
Thanks Tim, the tool you mentioned seems great.
For sure I need such thing ’cause I can’t do it manually relying on my memory and blog notes.
My site went from #2 for one of the most competitive search terms in the world to #17 overnight January 28th, for other important search terms from #3 to #15 another #7 to #26. Needless to say traffic is seriously down.
My first suspicion reading other postings in the last couple days is I haven’t changed my homepage much recently… time to get busy.
Another is Mercury retrograde just kicked in making communication difficult…. still scratching my head… anyone have any more ideas?
I’m seeing a lot of volatility in the current results.
That’s what exactly happened to my site and now it’s backing up again but there is a big difference in different datacenters which makes me worried.
When I search at home (which is at Toronto - Canada) my site is #3 and when I check it at work (It goes through a proxy at US) the same search term returns my site at #22 which is ridiculous! (Btw, I just use Google.com and not .ca)
But yes, I believe it’s better to start updating the site to show some activity.
The other important thing is if you have followed some link building strategies before and stopped doing so at some point, search engines may consider your site as out-dated data so consider making more permanent backlinks (like the one you just did by leaving comment at my blog
).
Nowadays Google became so much faster than what it used to be, so you can see the result of your SEO strategies much faster.
Hope everything will back to normal shortly
Same issues for us. One day things looked good, lots of page 1 ranking. Next day huge drops. I think it’s probably a temporary issue since it seems to affected all our organic listing on Google.
We’ll have to see what occurs on the next crawl.
Will be very happy when (if) thinks go back to normal.
Well, these things happen, one can only hope everything turns out right in the end. I mean lets hope it’s just an error sort of.