Whoa - 8:00 am on Feb 4, 2005 (gmt 0)

Yesterday one of the favorite sites I work on had only 79 visitors from Google. Normally, it would get 2,500 or so. Until yesterday, the lowest daily I've seen in the last few months is 985 visitors from Google.

I don't monitor keyphrases like some of you do, but for some phrases that I occasionally check that the site does well on, the site is now a no-show. Even for the last name of the person (a syndicated journalist) associated with the site, it's now way down in the rankings - normally it is #1 for her last name. It doesn't make any sense. It'd be like if you searched on Letterman, and his show was #80 on the list.

The site's a great resource for consumers on personal finance, real estate, and consumer news. Newsweek even featured the site this week as a great site for consumers. We've never done any optimization stuff that is bad - we just post good content every couple of days and put appropriate title and description tags on the page.

What could have caused this dramatic fall from grace? I don't see any sites that have outright hijacked the entire site. The only thing I can think of is that because the site is associated with a syndicated column and a metro news anchor maybe Google saw that column on other newspaper sites and the television transcripts on the station site and thought the site I work on stole it from those sites (when in fact our site is the original source).

The only other thing I can think of is that yesterday we changed the right nav on the page (it's a #include on rightnav.asp), which of course affected every page on the site , so maybe that threw Google off? It was a pretty minor change, so I don't see how that could have a bad effect.

Any ideas? I'm at a loss.