Two completely different sites dropped in google.de on Thursday

Two of my sites with completely different topic and site structure dropped

[elord]

Hello,
Has nobody noticed a drop in rankings on google.de? I mean two of my sites, which have nothing to do with each other, have been dropped on Thursday. I have no idea at all why this happened. One site dropped to the third of my normal traffic. I'm pretty sure it's because my rankings in google.de dropped dramatically. I just noticed that the traffic of another site I maintain dropped by almost 50%. What happend? I just wonder why nobody since Thursday started a thread in this forum. Am I the only one? I hope not.
Btw, site one has PR6, around 60,000 sites in google, traffic has been constand for over half a year. Site two has PR4 (PR5 two weeks ago) and around 15,000 sites in google.

Well, maybe somebody noticed the same or somebody has an idea why it happened to me.
Great forum.
Pythagoras

[zgb999]

Have you done some major changes recently or do you have some links to sites that have a Google penalty?

Let's say both of your sites link to site C and site C has been seen as doing some linking scheme Google does not like - this might explain it.

Let's say your sites have incoming links from site D and site D got a penalty and will not pass PR anymore - this might explain it.

There are many possible reasons for what you are experiencing.

What do the two sites have in common (in terms of linking...)?

[elord]

Hey zgb999,
thank you for trying to help me!
But my only problem is that I got too fast in panic and that I'm a little stupid.
Site two is running back to normal, I just forgot that it's a b2b site and that we had a national holiday in Germany on Thursday, which I forgot! I know, that's kinda stupid. Sorry! Well, I don't know what happened to "site one" though. On Thursday, the site was offline because of routing problems of my provider. Surprisingly, till today I had a lot less visits, than I had before the blackout. My visits are rising again a little today. Hopefully the site will be back to normal soon.
zgb999, I didn't change anything at "site one" for 3 weeks or so, maybe that is the reason google doesn't like my site anymore. I did some changes now, maybe that will help. How do I know I got a kind of penalty by google? I thought the only penalty is that the site is completely off the index, or are there other ways google can penalize a site? The number of site I have in the index is still the same.
Thanks again for your help and sorry again for my dumb thread.
Great forum.

elord

[nicksimon]

Seems like all large sites with more then 10000 pages suffered a week ago. Two of ours (500 000 pages / PR7 and 200 000 pages / PR5) had the same drop of around 30% and according to Alexa all the other I know of did the same.

So I guess you are not alone, which could make you feel better (did for us:)

[elord]

Hmm, interesting. That actually makes me feel a little better. ;-) Well, I guess we need to be patient now. Hopefully it'll be back to normal, soon. Today it's going up again. I have no clue, why this happened last week. I didn't do anything with my site. Googlebot is still crawling my site.