CainIV - 11:14 pm on May 26, 2008 (gmt 0)

Hello HuskyPup. Without being able to see the website in question, here is a checklist of items I would go look at that may have caused some issues.

Let's first clear up something:

Basically with a lot of commerce sites Google is saying make your money in Yahoo or MSN or buy into Adwords.

This is quite unlikely. I own an ecommerce website that is doing just fine and I have never once used Adwords for the website, and it has ranked page one for the last three years.

Here is the checklist Husky:

1. Check for supplementals using site:domain.com/* and compare those with the regular number of pages in the index. Also compare those to known keyword searches on pages where you have dropped.

2. Check to make sure each page returns 200 OK. I like to use Xenu Link Checker for this.

3. Check a snippet of some of the main pages in quotes in Google to see if other websites may have copied part of the page.

4. View the cache of affected pages to ensure that the cache in Google.com reflects the data on that page, and your website

I have often found in many cases that issues with rankings can derive from server issues, although this may not be the case in your situation