coincidence or collusion?

major drops in all the SEs

[LifeinAsia]

For many months, our main site has steadily been increasing in traffic and the number of indexed pages. We mainly tracked Google, but also saw increases from Yahoo and MSN. During the past few weeks, we've seen all 3 plummet.

- On May 5, page views from Yahoo referals droped from an average of 12-15,000/day to about 300-400/day. We still have about the same number of pages index as before, but don't rank as well as before for our keywords.

- Along with everyone else it seems, we've been hit by the latest Google update/fiasco/whatever. We went from close to 3 mil. pages index to about 200K, although we're now back up to about 1.2 mil. at most of the data centers. Traffic took a major nose dive, but "seems" to be coming back during the past few days.

- Traffic from MSN has always been minumal, but dropped to about 10-20% of previous levels about the same time.

For our part, we ahven't made any major changes to the site during that time- just the usual adding of content and minor tweaks here and there. (We've been doing this long enough to know the difference between minor/major tweaks.)

It's just strange/suspicious that all 3 took major plunges about the same time.

[caveman]

There is a less sinister and far more likely answer: A problem with your site, that is causing it to drop out of the top rankings. Could be a problem with the site's structure, changes you've made, or external factors (typically backlinks).

I know you said you have not made major changes, but if I had a buck for every time I've heard that, and upon digging, found an issue that was recently created, I'd have, well...lots of bucks. ;-)

You might also try this thread: Dropped Site Checklist [webmasterworld.com].

[LifeinAsia]

Trust me- we've been over the checklist several times. No, the changes we made were mostly cosmetic- different background color, changing positioning of some elements, etc. We'd been quite happy with the steady progress of the site and purposely haven't mucked with things so as to not rock the boat.