cynthiap - 2:57 pm on Sep 5, 2007 (gmt 0)

One of my sites that has ranked very well with google for about 9 months now dropped quite a bit of traffic starting around Aug 31 - Sept. 1. Yesterday it dropped a little further.

I was on page 1 for almost all my keywords.

The page that has suffered the most is my index page. I used to hold the number 2 or 3 spot on the first page of Google for my main keyword on my index page and now I can't even find my site for that keyword.

The index page can still be found with a few other keywords, on page 2, 3, or 4 so it hasn't been banned. I also used to rank on page 1 or 2 for these other keywords, so they have moved down in the listings.

I don't use any black hat techniques and I follow Google guidelines strictly.

I made changes to my navigational menu on August 27th. Ever since then my traffic has decreased slowly and then around Sept 1 dropped quite a bit. I added two new pages. One of the pages has as a link out to an affiliate.

I've had this affiliate link on many different pages of my site for a couple months and didn't have any problem with it. No loss in traffic.

The affiliate link doesn't really look like an affiliate link since they gave me a subdomain instead of an affiliate link. For example it looks like this.

widgets.widgetsforsale.com

There was no loss of traffic from this affiliate link for the past two months.

I'm wondering if the loss in traffic could be that the affiliate link is now present on too many pages?

Or is it just a google dance and I should wait it out?

Many of my other pages are still ranking well for their keyword. However some of them have disappeared from the search results as well and others moved down a notch or two.

Overall I've lost about 300-400 uniques a day, which mostly are a result of the index page not ranking for it's main keyword. I'm still getting about 900 uniques a day.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.
:)