MsHuggys - 2:23 am on Nov 10, 2005 (gmt 0)

"John-1976 states:

You don’t have to have done anything wrong to have fallen off Google. This happens all the time to web sites for no reason, and unfortunately they never return."

Incorrect. Doing nothing at all is a top reason for ranking plunge. It is a mistake to think, if it isn't broken, don't fix it. You need to work your sites daily, and failure to make a change daily on your main page especially, can very serious hurt ranking, eventually.

Plunge in ranking can in fact cause a site to "never return". This is most likely to happen because a webmaster who left the site unattended, has no idea over many months what went wrong. He/she changes this and that, randomly, hit and miss, and may only then break, what wasn't broken to begin with. Just adding new things to the page, and removing older content, partially, continually, would have prevented the problem.

It is also most likely to happen to a site quarterly, when Google does the seasonal update. That would be now. Things go good for 30, 45, 60, 75 days, then the update comes along. That is when everything that has been going wrong, is suddenly shoved in your face, and you become very aware that something is wrong.

This hurts in many ways. If you were updating, but made some critical mistakes in seo, you may not have slid when each mistake was made. So, you make more mistakes, thinking everything is fine, until the quarterly update. So, much has passed, so many mistakes, it is hard to isolate the problem(s). It will take alot of work to resolve the issues, and recover.

Since quarterly updates are a deep crawl, that is when all those bad neighborhood links are discovered, and you get the google whammy.

Simply put, most webmasters don't have the moxy for it. That is why they don't recover. When the tough gets going, they start putting in applications to work for the man... and we thin the pack.