Google Slapped Me- very big SERP drop

Marketing
1

Dear Webmasters

I have a review site running since 3 years. Got good position in Google SERP and getting traffic also. But last Thursday suddenly drop and vanished all keyword ranking and degraded . Now daily < 5 traffic from Google. Before also I face some drop but not like this big drop

I did not do any thing special and did not make much Back links, no black hat, updating frequently at least in a week. I check with many SEO tool but do not find much problem on my site.

Is there any body face like this big drop recently and after drop got back the position? Now nothing doing on it and just waiting for the back…My site is still indexing and also in the SERP . So Google did not kick me out… Any hope for back and after such drop, how long will take back or never back?.. is this drop by Google dancing?.. how long has to wait?

2

Welcome to the club. I faced such a drop around April 2008 and never recovered. I went from ranking top 5 to ranking #1 for about two weeks then dropped for the main keywords and all other keywords and never recovered. At my peak I was getting something like 2,000 visitors a day from Google (I think it was that much) and now I get around 35 visitors.

My site does not rank top 100 for competitive keywords no matter how many irrelevant results appear in those results. Last time I checked, it ranked below 600 for the most competitive search term, beneath hundreds of irrelevant results.

It’s been almost 4 years and I still haven’t recovered. I never did any blackhat, no link trades, nothing.

Google sucks. Get used to it.

3

Thanks cheesedude
So no need to hope?.. and start with other domains is so hard… without Google position the site is utterly waste

4

Out of interest, what was the site about?

In my experience, a site never truly drops and never recovers, and if it does it’s because the market was never there or more could have been done to save it.

5

Shakir,

The same thing happened to one of my sites in the October 2011 Panda update. Like you, I did everything I could to check that the site was OK, but so far it is still down.

I’ve heard of several similar cases. Some of them completely recovered after a few weeks or months - without any action on the webmaster’s part. But others didn’t.

You could try filing a reconsideration request to Google. See http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35843 It didn’t do me any good, except that I got a reply saying the site had no spam issues, which I already knew. But it might be worth a try for you.

I hope you get it sorted.

Mike

6

Review sites across the board seem to have been hit by Google. All I can say about yours, is: Good Job Google. Your site is not a review site. All you have done is rehash content from the host and thrown in some affiliate links. Of what use is that to the searcher? This is the exact type of site that Panda was designed to weed out from the results!

7

Interestingly, Google also has its own consumer reviews of businesses such as on Google Maps. Google is in competition with review sites.

Lots of sites drop in Google and some of them don’t recover. The market is there for my site. It’s about relevance. A site that is relevant to the search results should rank above irrelevant results. Right? Mine did rank and then in April 2008 dropped out of nowhere and never recovered. I was getting 35 visitors per day from Google last time I checked. I just checked now and I’m actually getting 25 visitors per day from Google.

Before my site dropped in April 2008, my two main competitors dropped, too. It took both of them a long time to recover, about a year, I believe. Both recovered. I did not.

True.

As for starting with another domain, my experience echoes that of many other webmasters who claim there is a sandbox. Google traffic for a new site builds for a few months then drops by 80% - 90% for no reason.

I registered a domain name in Oct. 2007 and did not develop it until Nov. 2009. From Oct. 2007 to Nov. 2009 the only content on the site was basically some crap I put on there. After I developed the site, traffic from Google started to build until April 2010 when it dropped. Here are my Google traffic figures for the entire month:

Oct. 2009: 69 (no real content except some crap)
Nov. 2009: 80 (I finished developing the site the final week of this month)
Dec. 2009: 1,696 (Google traffic starts to build)
Jan. 2010: 2,999
Feb. 2010: 3,483
Mar. 2010: 8,328 (Google traffic took a big jump)
Apr. 2010: 12,998 (Google traffic took another big jump)
May 2010: 5,534 (Google traffic crashes by 57%)
June 2010: 3,551 (Google traffic drops even more)
July 2010: 3,585 (Google traffic holds steady for a few months)
Dec. 2010: 2,889 (Google traffic drops a little more)
Mar. 2011: 4,127
June 2011: 3,351
Sept. 2011: 1,015 (Google traffic takes another drop in past few months)
Dec. 2011 (through first 27 days): 959

As you can see, my traffic from Google peaked at 12,998 in April 2010, about 5 months after I developed the site. Traffic dropped 57% from April 2010 to May 2010 then dropped some more before holding steady for a few months. Then traffic dropped and dropped and dropped.

I get a lot more traffic from Bing than I do from Google. My main competitor for two of my sites is a big money operator that operates a link farm that has a bunch of sites with duplicate, garbage content that all link back to the main site. At one time the competitor held 4 positions in the top 10 in Google using three different domain names all with essentially the same content and a subdomain of the main site.

If you don’t have big money to buy links from somewhere, you are never going to succeed in Google. That’s all there is to it.

Google sucks.

8

I have also faced this kind of disasters few month ago, BUT not i have recovered from that. Now all ranking are on right position. It was due to Panda, Just made some changes on website and renewed link building strategy according to panda, it worked for me

For suggestion, i would like to see your website so please share it and did you check your GWT’s errors ??

9

Clark Jackson,

I assume you meant that you have now recovered - rather than not recovered.

If so, what are the changes you mentioned? Did you just make some minor changes to the wording of a few pages? Or was it a wholesale redesign of the site? Or something in between?

Also, you say you renewed your link-building strategy. Do you mean you actually went out to get new links?

The reason I’m asking is that if those action worked for you, they might work for others as well.

Mike

10

Almost my competitors are like me, take the features from the host and place in the site, make comparison, validation etc… but all are OK and me drooped… and also my targeted keywords are hosting related…

The reviews are genuine… monitoring always on all the hosts and updating on it… also for new webmasters hard to go to many host, check the features, price etc… So in my site all most best hosts are listed with features, price etc…

Of what use is that to the searcher?

So its useful for the searcher…

11

well, how long it took for the recovery… and when its happens, after the recovery any drops?.. interested to know more

Did not do anything after the drops , just researching for the best ways

12

One of my client too faced the same kind of problem, and after that we did lots of backlinks, but still site is not back. The main reason for his drop were, he had changed the server location and he had followed some black-hat methods. But, in your case, it seems, your site is lack of backlinks now. As far as you are ranking, why can’t you get some more backlinks and see how it goes?

13

Londonseo,

I don’t think back links are the answer. In the case of my site, we have over a thousand quality links from reputable sites, with relevant anchor text. But that didn’t prevent most pages suffering big falls, with no recovery in site.

Mike

14

Your site is not useful to the searcher! You can try and argue and rationalize it anyway you like, but the site is still dropped and trying to argue will not cause Google to admit they made some sort of mistake and flick a switch to rank you higher. Thats not going to happen. There are a many review sites asking every day over at Google webmaster help as to why they dropped. Your site has all the characteristics that they have and you are showing the classic symptom that all these other webmasters have: denial
I told you exactly what is wrong with the site. You either fix that or languish in mediocrity. Your site, your choice.

15

I would check to see if you were banded from google. If you are not banded then, I would look for some high pr authority links so that google likes your site and will consider it quality again.

16

It looks like after the updation in Panda Algorithm your site is punished by Google. As Panda focus greatly on content, so you should check your content now and make sure that it must be unique, original and fresh. Secondly check back links of your site, may be you put your links on such sites which were already in penalty .

17

The site ws NOT affected by Panda! The OP said it dropped “last Thursday”. There was no iteration of the Panda algorithm around that time.

The parrots are starting to turn up in this thread …

18

Not banned from Google bcz its listed in SERP and just degraded for all of my targeted keywords…Also do not think the high PR links will help my site to boost

19

Thank you for your replay and appreciate on the open talk “Do not think that m arguing with you”
I said it useful for the searchers bcz… all most sits contains user reviews, features reviews, some unnecessary commends…this will confuse the users and to read all the information will take long time… also very hard to know the best host list

So to solve this we make a site and included all the top graded hosts, our editors review, by tools like up time checker, forums and even the host forums etc… according to review changing the position, grade etc… And to make easy for the users, we add all the host price, features and comparison with other host… this is helping really searchers bcz we are getting many user reviews about our sits…

20

You still missing the point that searchers do not want review sites with affiliate links in their search results! Google has responded in response to that analysis of user behavior. That business model is now dead.