SiteMatch and SERPS

[girish]

My site disappeared this weekend from its #2 /#4 position for widget/widgets (money keywords with 2 million results). I spent Saturday and Sunday trying to figure out what I may have done "wrong" or what happened (suspecting misdirected 301s, affiliate data feeds, linking issues, blacklisting by competitors, etc, etc. -- you know how crazy one can get when their top ranked site suddenly disappears).

Today, Monday morning, the site is back to its original position. The only change I made was to restock the SitMatch account which had become depleted in September. A little history is in order... In March, 2004 I took over management of the domain. At that time the site had 6 pages of content, no inbound links, and was not ranking. Without giving it much thought I signed up the home page URL in SiteMatch with a $250 budget and then just forgot about it. In the meanwhile, the site's content grew to 150+ pages and received 1500+ inbound links. Naturally, our rank improved and the site gradually made its way to position #2 for our main keywords. All along I had attributed the rise to the FREE factors and gave no attention to the SiteMatch account. All that changed this Saturday.

In retrospect, it appears that a SiteMatch URL can stay top-ranked for quite a while after you stop funding it. In this case, the URL remained at the top of the SERPS for about 6 weeks before dropping this weekend to page 25. Perhaps there was another explanantion for the drop and pop of this site (giggling of the index, use of older database, etc.). Unless I learn otherwise, I think the SiteMatch effect may have been the key in my case.

[mikec]

From all that i've read in the past 2 nights or so this seems to be an issue that yahoo had. results got really screwy for a few days. I have read similar cases to this, but I've also run across a bunch of sites having similar issues that weren't sitematch related.

Many people were reporting seeing alot of previously banned/black hat/ spam pages in the results for the past few days. some say it was yahoo trying to inflate the number of sites in their directory, as google seems to have done recently, some say there was a problem with the database and it got rolled back, others claim it was related to the testing of some algo tweaks. all seem to agree that it will back to relative normality within the next few weeks.

in short, you're not the only one who's been having problems. Many are reporting extreme abnormalities with the yahoo serps lately. I wouldn't be surprised actually to see alot of back and forth bouncing for the next week or so unfortunately. I guess we'll all have to wait and see.