steerpikegg - 7:28 pm on Sep 20, 2011 (gmt 0)

@MrSavage - I understand where you are going with that and I did fully expect the page to drop once the established sites started writing about the product. What I am trying to fathom though is why such a large drop only in G.

@bwnbwn - I is just one page with information about the product- I'm not selling anything or providing any service, collecting data, affiliating etc so I really couldn't see the need for contact/privacy or anything other than information.

To use an analogy, the site is new and maybe G doesn't trust the site, but it would be like going into a pub, seeing a new face whom you didn't know and was maybe slightly suspicious of and then arresting them and throwing them in jail with the serial killers and murderers. In fact, worse, because the site is ranking far below the web equivalent of these.

Sure, it's a new site, it's small and doesn't have much in the way of backlinks, but really, is it SO incredibly evil that it should be treated worse than the blackest spammers and sites having absolutely zero to do with the subject and not even in a language relevant to the target audience?

As I say, it's just an experiment, but to me a very revealing and also very depressing one.

Experiment aside, and talking about more normal and substantial sites, it's still very grim. I guess this is the way things are in 2011 but I'd so much love to go back to the days when you could build a site, get a stable (and perhaps low) ranking and then work on the site, add and improve content and see a steady growth in relation to the work you put in. These days it's just completely random, staggering from penalty to algo-change with absolutely no idea why or with any clue of how to improve your site.