nettulf - 12:27 pm on Aug 15, 2011 (gmt 0)

Strange, the exact thing happened to a couple of my 1.5 year old affiliate sites.

Something made them jump very high to position 2-3 in June, with lots of traffic as a result.

But after a few days there there were visits from Google (according to Statcounter), and the site jumped about 600 positions way back. No message in Webmaster tools, nothing.

One common thing the Apache logs revealed was that the reviewer tried to read the file "this_page_should_not_exist.fake" in the root domain of all of the sites. So watch out for that... maybe testing for proper 404 response. Or who knows what...

The sites were not even linked, except for using the same Statcounter, and also the same affiliate ID in some of the URLs.