Alex997 - 9:49 am on Aug 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

What ARE you doing Google?! (rhetorical - don't expect a reply!)

Another huge plummet this Friday for our target 'london' keywords phrases...

***** london => #4 down to #26
***** in london => #6 down to #67
london ***** => #11 down to #30

All other phrases (including longer tail ones with london in) seem unaffected. Plus ***** on it's own is about the same.

No messages in WMT, so I can only assume that all the hundreds of backlinks containing these phrases (good mixture, not spammy) have all been devalued by Google all of a sudden - much like whatever happened on the 20th July.

ie. up until 20th Aug ranking were better and better in a nice even downwards slope (creating more and more quality backlinks). Then they dropped 60 places overnight, then a recovery slope for 2 weeks, then 1 week normal (last week), and now dropped 20 places overnight again.

Surely Google should not be using trial and error on the general public in their algorithms this much?! Don't they have private test systems to simulate this stuff - they own enough of the worlds servers!