Page 2 Penalty?

Site has been moved from page 1 to page 2

[londoh]

My site has just been shifted from Page 1 to page 2 or 3 for all the keyphrases I check, even the company name where we have sat at No. 1 for ever

Yesterday it was 1 - 5 for a whole bunch of useful searches

Today its been dropped 10 - 20 places.

PR is still OK. backlinks are still the same

Why?
I dont know. Some immediate thoughts...
1) We had some problems with duplicate content from db generated urls - but all those got 301'ed seberal months ago.

2) We had a missed php constant a month ago that meant google got?sess_id=tr8dfn6asd7h3 for a few days (which now also show on the google search result urls)

3) I put up about 15% new pages last month.

Any opinion or advice would be appreciated

[olias]

Interesting, on one of the competitive serps I watch, a site that has been top for almost the whole year has suddenly dropped to 21st today.

They have also dropped around 10 places for a whole bunch of other keywords, I'm not aware of anything that has changed on their site, seems the same as ever.

[b0rdslide]

I've seen the same for a site I watch, no major website changes other than the usual content addition but dropped to second page even for the company name.

[jimbeetle]

I'm not aware of anything that has changed on their site, seems the same as ever

But maybe things changed on other sites that moved them above this one.

[BigDave]

Or maybe google canged their algo and the current site design is less appealing to them.

Judging by my increase in traffic, google definitely went through an algo change sometime in the saturday-sunday timeframe.

[londoh]

jimbeetle
its definately not other sites. the drop is across the board on a wide range of phrases and very clearly 10 or 20 places

BigDave
timing was about 18 hours ago
algo change? well maybe, but other sites seem to be more or less holding position and from where I'm sitting it looks quite personal!

One other thing I did a couple of weeks ago was sign up for froogle

[olias]

But maybe things changed on other sites that moved them above this one.

Well my site was in line to take over the top spot and I hadn't changed anything.

My guess is that they may have been hit by a slight algo change that devalued some of their insane number of links from lots of very similar domains.

[BigDave]

I'm sitting it looks quite personal!

If it was something personal, then you would be a lot deep[er than page 2. Hell, position 11 and 12 get a hell of a lot more traffic than position 7-8, so page 2 isn't always all that bad.

I got nailed in the late September change for about 30% of my traffic. It was the first month that my traffic ever dropped. It wasn't a penalty, and it wasn't personal.

In late October it climbed almost back to normal.

If the boost over the weekend holds, I should have around a 25% increase over my early September traffic.

I haven't checked my lower traffic sites yet, and I'm not going to bother. They still jump around pretty drastically day to day, so it wouldn't really tell me anything useful.

Your rankings *will* bounce around, no matter what you do. If you only got bounced down to the second or third page, you are doing something right. Instead of panicing, just do some more of what you are already doing.

[webdude]

I dropped about 100 places this weekend for a main keyphrase on one of my sites. Been scratching myself and wondering why, but I have not touched the site for the past several weeks. I noticed that out of 400 pages of content, the last weeks 200 pages that were indexed are now up to 300 pages so something definitely happened this weekend.

Hmmm...

More pages and a drop. Wonder what that is all about.

[stickyboy]

londoh,

I have had pretty much exactly what you described in your intial post. This happened for me on the 15th Nov. Havent managed to figure it out yet.