walrus - 3:27 pm on Dec 13, 2010 (gmt 0)

When a 10 year old site converts well for 9 of those years then 2010 comes along and everything goes to pot, I gonna venture a guess and say it's not the site owner who messed it up.

Exactly, we have all been on a rollercoaster for years but it never hit the ground before.

@steer, thanks, good luck, seems to be a factor in the algo this year

openly endorsing other search engines on their web sites.

I wonder if many others have done that. Ironically enough when I added an ask search box ,they announced the retreat from the search engine war a week or so later.

I get so many webmasters come to me claiming how they have "no idea in the world" how they were penalized, dropped down etc and then when I check their website its apparent almost immediately.

Good point, many are victims of their own device. I am still correcting things that may have contributed just never seen anything like this before. Aside from my own mistakes, or losing a few quality links, facebook is gobbling traffic, G added the left nav and all the other stuff pushing results down their homepage which meant even #1 is #8 half the time.
I am convinced with enough quality links, you could have a blank page, no doc type, no meta nothing, just a picture of a running shoe with an alt tag, and with enough links especially from authority sites, it will rank #1 for running shoe. IMHO Googles algo gives to much weight to inbound links.