Google Search Engine Results Performance Nose Dive!

[Sunset_Jim]

For the last two months my site has appeared in the top 10 SERP as a result of SEO, but beginning on August 14, my page rank, SERP, page impressions and Google Adsense performance all began a steep nose dive for no apparant reason! I can't even find my site in the top 300 results for my key phrases. The SERP is like it was before I conducted the SEO. I haven't recently made any significant changes to my site. This has seriously affected my Adsense revenue. Can anyone explain what might be happening?

[Marcia]

Welcome to the board, Jim. Is there anything that could remotely cause a penalty of some sort, or was there a change in backlinks?

[annej]

One of my site's homepage just nosedove from the top 10 page onto page 2 about then. It looks a lot like the serps from one of the many versions we were getting in the last Google update. I think they are juggling around some factors in the algo.

[John_Creed]

It's only been 3 days. Not enough time to panic. I've seen people experience much worse before things finally went back to normal.

What do you mean by your page rank beginning a steep decline? Are you now a PR 0, or did it go down by 1 or 2?

[Sunset_Jim]

By nose dive I mean my PR on my home page went from 3/10 to 0/10 while my back links doubled. I have not done any thing to cause my site to be penalized by Google. I have over 300 external links to my home page.

[Bobby_Davro]

Sounds like a deliberate PR penalty to me.

[Sunset_Jim]

Another point - It appears that only my home page suffered the drop in PR to 0/10. Why would this page suffer a drop and not the other pages?

[DarkFriend]

My site was in the top 5 for a particular keyword, and recently dropped to 25. The top results are a bunch of .pdfs, .docs, and other "files" rather than HTML. Good thing, is that my competition dropped to. Saw my backlinks go from 79 to 42, when on other search engines they show a good 200 backlinks. Oh well.. One other thing to show you are in the same boat as everyone else: I created a new page on May 5th, and it NOW finally has a Page Rank.

[Sunset_Jim]

I think the thing that is so frustrating to Web site designers and developers is the uncertainty associated with Google and the impact of its index timing and search results algorithms on site listings. One never knows the effect of changes made to Web pages. Also, one never knows for sure the causes for changes in PR and SERP. If I start assuming that reacent changes made to my site might be the cause of my problem and start reversing them, I could be hurting myself for no reason. Also, the cycle can take months to run it's course.

[vbjaeger]

Similiar thing happened to my site this morning. I had been steadilty increasing, and for our biggest key phrase, it just dropped from the top 40 to number 150. I dont know why it would be penalized. We have not done anything that I am aware of that would result in a penalty.

All of the data centers except -fi still show the better results. and the main index is showing it cached as of yesterday.

[John_Creed]

PR dropped to zero *and* the site lost position for most keywords?

Over the last few months lots of sites have went PR0 for no reason, but most of them are still doing well in the SERPS.

Your situation could be a penalty.

Doublecheck that PR0 page to make sure there are no hidden text, links, or anything else that could get you penalized. Also, are you linking to any other PR0 websites?

[vbjaeger]

I just re-checked our results and the main index is matching -fi exactly. I dont know if that would be the case for everybody, but -dc, -va, -ab, -ex, -cw, -in, and -sj all show the same results for my particular keyword phrase and are significantly different from -fi.

[Sunset_Jim]

The Google PR on my home page was restored today from PR0 to its previous level. My SERP, however, remains low.