ichthyous - 2:29 pm on Oct 22, 2012 (gmt 0)

I am seeing very odd fluctuations in positioning over the weekend...from page three back to #2 where I was before, then today back to page three. Google dropped my site to page three (and still falling) for some terms I was in top 5 for years. There is simply no way that the hordes of junk sites that are ranking ahead of me now are better in any way. So I assume I've been hit by a penalty of some sort. Not an exact match domain and no WMT spammy links warnings of any kind. I have noticed that the pages which have dropped also have a (Google) rewritten page title, while the pages which survived have kept their own title. Only thing I can see is perhaps a big penalty for duplicate content now, or perhaps lack of freshness? All kinds of new sites have taken over the top spots and most of them are blogs or feed content that is updated daily. More 'static' sites that don't accumulate as many links or social media followers are gone. Both my top competitors moved up actually, and are now consistently in top 5...both have older wordpress blogs.