Top 3 in Google for over a month, slapped to page 34 overnight

[JasonValens]

I think I'll chip in with my theory, for entertainment purposes only. I've seen drops in traffic on 'quality" (whatever that vague term means) content sites. However, the traffic drops are only from the U.S and there has been an increase in traffic from other countries.

Some people have reported that scraper or low quality sites have returned to the first page of Google and are outranking 'quality' sites.

Some people have reported that their rankings are fluctuating over very short periods of time. Sometimes five minutes later different sites appear at the top of the serps.

This is what I think is going on: Some tweak(s) has been made at certain Google data centers (explains the fluctuations over the short period of time) in the United States (explains my stats).

The theory that I pulled out of my ass is that google is placing sites penalized by the first Panda tweak near the top of the results for some searchers and tracking the bounce rate / time spent on these sites / whether someone then searches for Yahoo or Bing in Google (hah!) after visiting as a semi automated method of validating their penalty based on searcher behavior with bounce as a measure of quality.

Therefore my prediction is that the scraper / low quality sites will disappear over the next week or two and rankings for 'quality' sites will return to normal. So the message is, don't panic.

We'll see. If I'm wrong you can punish me any way that you see fit (suggestions on a postcard please, remember postcards?).

[markowe]

Originally Posted by JasonValens

The theory that I pulled out of my ass is that google is placing sites penalized by the first Panda tweak near the top of the results for some searchers and tracking the bounce rate / time spent on these sites / whether someone then searches for Yahoo or Bing in Google (hah!) after visiting as a semi automated method of validating their penalty based on searcher behavior with bounce as a measure of quality.

Well, finally an SEO theory where the originator is honest about its source

That should be a prerequisite for all SEO-related posts, "Google will penalise you if you post the same article to more than one article directory - do you like my theory, I read it on the back of a pack of Corn Flakes (or maybe it was over at DP )?"

Having said that, I like your theory, it makes some sort of crazy sense! Let's see... My scraped sploggy blog thing should divebomb about... now! I dunno though, all that stuff about bounce rate. I have at least one pretty low quality site that has a really low bounce rate, like 30%. Still, maybe that's why it's doing well!

[milczy]

I agree with that one. Here in Australia in a very competitive niche there is a site which is ranking second and when you check it out it has about 5 crappy affliate linked pages and no backlinks. It is beating out some big brand name sites! It is just weird what is going on. And yes it happened on June 7th. Well June 6th here! I have lost 90% of the traffic from my sites. Mind you I am only new to this and so I was only making on average $50 per week. all gone now. Damn what a nice birthday present for my birthday! June 7th. lol!

[JasonValens]

Well, finally an SEO theory where the originator is honest about its source

Thank you sir. I find it more appropriate than:

"This one time I got my Geocities page on the first page of Google for a keyword phrase (Disclaimer: Only when I searched in quotes for some reason") due to some random statistical variation within a complex algorithm that no one understands completely. I am now an SEO God and you can have all mah secretz for the low price of ONLY $37 DOLLA kthx"

[sparkRyder78j]

This happened to my site exactly a month ago. Ranking on the first page and then overnight it fell to page 40+. It still hasn't come back after a month. I am updating the site and backlinking.

[rinor81]

Happened to me now, so frustrating that I don't know what to do anymore.
You work your ass off and Google just feels like dropping your site.

Had a site on places 26-28 for 2 keywords, was able to promote it to places 12-13 and then to place 10 for both keywords. Than I guess Google sees it in its good eye or whatever, right?

This morning I find my site in places 61-62 for the 2 keywords. From place 10??? Come on!

Now tell me this is not frustrating, I mean how can you run a business when Google decides to do whatever he wishes every Monday to Friday?

What now? Keep building backlinks and adding content? Who knows what's next. Traffic is hurt and no sales of-course....so angry right now I want to cry....

Anyone?

[Ernie Lonardo]

Sorry rinor we are all in the same boat and have no say or control over Google.

I did have a pretty decent day today, while nowhere near back to normal, lets just wait a couple of weeks and hope for the best before doing anything drastic.

[dagaul101]

This could be the new Google Panda update, then again brand new sites in a competitive term may be there for a few days or weeks then pushed back to a much lower page after Google's dance

[JasonValens]

Looks like the theory I pulled out of my ass up there might be right. OK, it could have been due to anything but had an average 106% increase in traffic today to 'quality' content sites, anyone else recovering?

[rauff]

I had the same problem but later found this happens because of low quality backlinks

[2stroke]

**UPDATE**
I submitted a request to Google, a few days later they sent me an email basically saying I wasn't "manually" docked and wasn't breaking any rules. There is a little info in the email, I will copy/paste it at the end of this thread in case someone is interested.

The good news is today I am back on page 1 taking both the 6th and 7th spots. I will be back up to top 3 soon... if your interested the site is:
how to reduce thighs . org and of course that's my keyword.

Here is the google letter, I can't post links yet so I edited it a bit:

Dear site owner or webmaster of (web site address), We received a request from a site owner to reconsider (web site address) for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search. If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

[Chucky]

Originally Posted by 2stroke

**UPDATE**
I submitted a request to Google, a few days later they sent me an email basically saying I wasn't "manually" docked and wasn't breaking any rules. There is a little info in the email, I will copy/paste it at the end of this thread in case someone is interested.

The good news is today I am back on page 1 taking both the 6th and 7th spots. I will be back up to top 3 soon... if your interested the site is:
how to reduce thighs . org and of course that's my keyword.

Here is the google letter, I can't post links yet so I edited it a bit:

Dear site owner or webmaster of (web site address), We received a request from a site owner to reconsider (web site address) for compliance with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site's ranking. Google's computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If you've experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site's content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you've changed the URLs for a large portion of your site's pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search. If you're still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team

Congrats! Must be quite a relief!

I've been waking up everyday for that moment, but hasn't happened yet!

I myself was considering submitting a reconsideration request. Can you please indicate if this is the page you used for submitting your request?

https://www.google.com/webmasters/to...deration?pli=1

Was it a RECONSIDERATION request that you submitted or some other request? This sentence from Google in their reply "....There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site...." confuses me.

Thanks and congrats again!
Chucky

[2stroke]

Originally Posted by Chucky

Congrats! Must be quite a relief!

I've been waking up everyday for that moment, but hasn't happened yet!

I myself was considering submitting a reconsideration request. Can you please indicate if this is the page you used for submitting your request

(link removed)

Was it a RECONSIDERATION request that you submitted or some other request? This sentence from Google in their reply "....There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site...." confuses me.

Thanks and congrats again!
Chucky

Yep, that's exactly what I filed. It took several days for them to get back to me. Unless you check your Google Webmaster messages daily, you might want to click the box to have the messages forwarded to your email if you haven't already.

I was tweaking the site almost daily but nothing that would make it jump from page 34+ to page 1 overnight. Heck I don't even know how you to make a site go from oblivion to page 1 overnight, yet that's exactly what happened.

I don't trust it yet either, who's to say it won't drop out of the rankings again tomorrow?

Good luck with yours, I guess my advice, based on this experience, would be keep adding content, quality backlinks, and tweak your on page seo, so when it does come back it's even stronger. Of course it's not really advice, we all know we should be doing that all the time anyways LOL

[jcruz]

This definantly does happen a lot with newer sites, i think its the fact that your the new kid on the block and you haven't established your reputation. Google doesn't know wheter your the truly an authority for that keyword.
Maybe it just doesn't natural to have a site to rank on page 1 after only a few weeks. So when it gets there thats when google takes notice. Just keep adding quality content, and updating your blogs. And just stick to High page rank backlinks, and maybe through in some press releases. Variety is the key, don't stick to one source, try to make it look as natural as possible, and don't build backlinks and just stop either, cause that doesn't look natural either. Just build a variety of high quality backlinks slowly and you should start seeing some improvement in the serps.

[Chucky]

Originally Posted by 2stroke

Yep, that's exactly what I filed. It took several days for them to get back to me. Unless you check your Google Webmaster messages daily, you might want to click the box to have the messages forwarded to your email if you haven't already.

I was tweaking the site almost daily but nothing that would make it jump from page 34+ to page 1 overnight. Heck I don't even know how you to make a site go from oblivion to page 1 overnight, yet that's exactly what happened.

I don't trust it yet either, who's to say it won't drop out of the rankings again tomorrow?

Good luck with yours, I guess my advice, based on this experience, would be keep adding content, quality backlinks, and tweak your on page seo, so when it does come back it's even stronger. Of course it's not really advice, we all know we should be doing that all the time anyways LOL

Thank you 2stroke! That's what I will do next week also. Google analytics tells me that I'm ranking #1 for some weird long tail kw. But I'm no where for the main kw that I was ranking for. I also see that you were not the only one that returned on 17th. Ang update from google?

So your comeback may not have had anything to do with your reconsideration request. Feels like I'm the only one that has not come back yet

Thanks a lot and I sincerely hope this was your last dance

Chucky

[2stroke]

Update #2
Earlier yesterday I checked my ranking and I was #1 on the first page for my keyword, I thought to myself "yesssssssss".

I checked a couple hours later and I was #3 on the first page, I said "hmmmmmm".

Then in the evening I had dropped to page 2. I have seen this before, it seems that I am accessing different servers in the evening or something because ranking will change dramatically and be back to normal the next day.

Just tossing that out there, have a great night.

[danhoff]

same here bro. my site jump from #1 to #9, looks like #9 is the place for me

[mithil]

This is quite normal thing. Google might have found the content relevant to the keyword and started ranking the page. But the ranking is not just depend upon the content of any website. It checks the site age, backlink count and so many other things.
As you have said the site is newly launched, may be it had pulled back the ranking for the site.
But I am sure you be on the top very soon.

[2stroke]

Holy thread resurrection Batman!

As of yesterday, I am on page 2 of Google for my keyword. It's cached from May 4th. So it came back from the depths of hell, but it's still got a ways to go.

You would think in 2 months that Google would have re-crawled my site, but like I said in a different thread...

Google Is Broken

[morrow66]

I have had this happen to me before, Its really annoying. I would agree with some of the others here and say give it sometime to settle then try to make your SEO stronger.

[CrimsonTide]

ONE WORD:

P A N D A

Google slapped us all silly.

[atrbiz]

I've had this happen to one of my many sites and to be honest I just kept building quality links to my site and after a few weeks it jumped back up.

[TheTroglodyte]

You've been "sandboxed" and it is happening more frequently now. Most likely if you haven't done anything too extreme with backlinks you will get your page back within 60 days.

[kimseo]

Originally Posted by 2stroke

Brand new site about 5 weeks ago, for the last month I have been in the top 3 Google search for my keyword. I went from there to page 34 overnight. I thought it was a fluke so I have just been patient the last few days, adding content and links, waiting to see if I spring back up, but no dice.

It was my best traffic site, I wish Google would at least let a person know what the problem was so I don't make the same mistake again.

Anybody else have this happen recently? Was something new implemented in Google?

Thanks

It might be possible that your site has been sandboxed

[2stroke]

Originally Posted by kimseo

It might be possible that your site has been sandboxed

I am thinking so as well, but it's now starting to come back, at least to page 2 so far. I have added some good links and content since this happened so I am expecting to be on page 1 again soon.

[tonyalves]

My main site (close to 10 years old now) went from PR3 to PR2 in the last Panda update and even though the home page went from page 1 to page 2 in Google, the inside pages must have remained about the same because new visitors and page views averages are the same as before the update.

I am a bit disappointed about the drop in PR, but happy that I didn't loose visitors and page views which means that my Adsense and Vibrant Media earnings have not dropped.

The point I am trying to make? Just keep on building back links and posting good content and eventually your site will bounce back and not be drastically affected (negatively) in future updates.

[Darren Kilgariff]

Originally Posted by 2stroke

I am thinking so as well, but it's now starting to come back, at least to page 2 so far. I have added some good links and content since this happened so I am expecting to be on page 1 again soon.

My site is relatively new (5 weeks) and went to page 3 Google which is no great shakes I know.I was pleased with this though,only to find overnight I cant even find my site on Google without putting the URL in.Hope its just this dance people refer to otherwise alot of effort has been w.asted

[Will Leighton]

My site was steadily moving from ranking from 50 to 22 in the past month of SEO I've been doing (backlinking, new content etc...), seemed to be going well, and then BOOM, a majority of my keywords droped and my main keyword on wednesday dropped to 28, and then yesterday it dropped to 35.

Sites only 6 or 7 weeks old.

[jpr106]

This happens to new sites ALL the time so this is absolutely happening to many people with new sites, it's happened to me a million times (slight exaggeration) but because I consistently backlink and maintain the work, my sites recover and end up ranking higher than before.

A lot of people, well respected people here, say you should just buy the domain and wait 3 months until it "matures" and then start building your site.

I go about things differrently. I buy the domain, and build the site and articles and do on page SEO within 2 weeks, and from here on in I backlink consistently with my own strategy for about 2 months, and then I re-assess where I am.

I bought a new domain about 3 months ago, built a site and drove backlinks and that site had made me about $600 since then, it only gets about 30 uniques a day too!

[tonyalves]

Originally Posted by tonyalves

My main site (close to 10 years old now) went from PR3 to PR2 in the last Panda update and even though the home page went from page 1 to page 2 in Google, the inside pages must have remained about the same because new visitors and page views averages are the same as before the update.

I am a bit disappointed about the drop in PR, but happy that I didn't loose visitors and page views which means that my Adsense and Vibrant Media earnings have not dropped.

The point I am trying to make? Just keep on building back links and posting good content and eventually your site will bounce back and not be drastically affected (negatively) in future updates.

Here is an update to my previous post.

This morning I got up and sat at the computer to check my overnight earnings and my emails and got a very pleasant surprise.

My site is back to PR3

Is this a sign that Panda is settling down?

I don't know about that, what I know is that in my opinion this reinforces my believe that if you are doing things right and your site gets affected by a Google update, don't worry about it, just keep doing the same things (adding unique content and building backlinks) and before you know it, it will bounce back.