dataguy - 11:10 pm on Sep 16, 2006 (gmt 0)

My main site has had two periods of traffic fluctuations before, but never anthing like this.

Last night traffic went from about a thousand visitors from Google per hour to about 10. My pages are still indexed, they have just lost their ranking. This web site has not changed substantially for months except that we have gotten choosier about the new content that we allowed (it's a user-created info site) and we have recently added RSS feeds and links for our users to easily add their articles to social bookmarking sites. This has greatly increased our backlinks, which makes us wonder if this caused some sort of penalty. (We had been gaining about 100 natural, unsolicited backlinks per day for years.)

We're also wondering if the fact that we've gotten pickier about the content we allow has gotten some of the SEO's mad at us and one of them did something to get us de-ranked? I don't even know if that's possible, but I do know that our competitors who allow all kinds of user created content (pharma, mortgage, gambling) have not been hurt.