liamvictor - 5:36 pm on Nov 21, 2006 (gmt 0)

I had a site that always ranked #1 or #2 for "MyDomainName" as a keyword. That's now position #43 in google.com (and ROW) and #12 in google.co.uk.

I was suddenly granted a big increase in traffic (all from google) on the 13th November, and then at midnight on the 15th I stopped getting the traffic, and also seem to have been punished as regards the domain name "keyword". On the 14th I had 298 searches, 15th I had 255 searches, on the 16th I had 33. (Stats from HitTail search referer log)

Searching for MyDomainName.co.uk still returns it as #1 in all googles.

Until I read this thread I felt this was a punishment for duplicate content. This particular website had various (paid for) articles on it, which I'd published as an experiment and to test a script I'd written. Most of the articles hadn't been changed at all. The site is a few years old, but these articles (over a thousand in approx 30 directories) were published at end of October.

I'm in the process of editing them now, I immediately did a "quick" search and replace job, but need to go through and really rework the material, changing a lot more of the keywords and phrases.

I should add that the site has a Google PR of 4, which doesn't seem to have been affected (as yet).