Help me explain this drop in rankings

Dropped 10 spots in SERPs for most terms

[pokerjoker]

I've been humming along in a very competitive keyword space since mid-February, owning a spot in the top ten SERPs for over 30 keywords. On 8/19, my site dropped anywhere from 5 to 10 spots for nearly all of my keywords (although the site remains #1 for the three keywords that held the #1 spot for).

This is the first such drop I've seen in 6 months, and looks nothing like the normal fluctuations I've seen during that time.

I haven't made any drastic changes to the site recently, although we started a forum (as a subdomain) around 6 weeks ago. The forum has been generating content and keyworded links at an extremely rapid pace.

Is it possible I've incurred a penalty for too many incoming links for certain keywords in too short a time? Or is there another reason for the drop that I'm missing?

Thanks.

[goodroi]

I don't see you mention inbound links. This is a big factor in ranks.

[steveb]

Look at the pages moving in front of you. Google's current update has added the largest amount of useless dreck in a long time. If everything goes similar to how Google has acted in the recent past, all that trash will be removed fairly soon.

[dataguy]

I have 1 main site that relies on traffic sent from Google, and it has an identical story as yours, pokerjoker. Toward the last week of May it really started ranking well, getting nearly 3 times the previous traffic from G.

Traffic kept building since then as the web site has grown. I told my wife that I've become a Google junkie waiting every day to see the new record in traffic. I even had to add another employee to help manage the site.

Then last Friday, traffic dipped for the first time since May. I don't watch keywords too closely, but the ones I watch have dropped from the top of the first page to the bottom, or perhaps to the top of page 2. Traffic is down 27% from the norm for the day of the week.

I knew it had to end sooner or later I guess. I sure hope steveb is right that it will correct itself. It could certainly be worse, but I would love for it to get back to where it was before Friday the 19th.

[pokerjoker]

Update: it looks like the rankings drop was a prelude to a duplicate content penalty, similar to the one discussed here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Basically, incoming URLs like www.example.com/?querystringvar=123
are getting indexed, and Google believes that this is a duplicate of www.example.com (in fact, they both request the same document).

Now to remove all of that indexed garbage...

[dataguy]

Ok, this is totally different than my situation... I have 105,000 pages, but no querystrings.

[Phil_AM]

I've experienced a similar drop to Poker Joker. What is the duplicate content penalty?

I've recently partnered with a few other sites, having them send biz my way from their portal. I'm using a tracking id in the link url back to me:
www.example.com?Sourceid=500312

Is this a problem?

[steveb]

Those URLs can be a big problem. If Google gets confused and starts ranking a query string duplicate instead of what should be the "real" page, then significant drops would be a normal result.

[theBear]

steveb intones:

'Those URLs can be a big problem. If Google gets confused and starts ranking a query string duplicate instead of what should be the "real" page, then significant drops would be a normal result."

Looks to me like Google got confused.

Canonical issues again, PR splits as well I would think.

ciml, you reading this thread?

MikeNoLastName, also had a problem with this, it cost him some time being unemployed.

[triumph]

I've been well ranked for hundreds of non-competitive keywords. As of 8/19 my keywords started dropping from the rankings. I lost about 20% Friday. And for the final nail in my coffin, last night I lost the remainder of the traffic I had from Google, about 7k a day. Perhaps the penalty was applied 8/19, and it took time to propogate through the datacenters?

I've read in previous posts that - you can be sure you were penalized if you don't show up first for your own site/doamin name. I don't even show up on the first page of my site name. In fact, I get sites that have linked to me.

Is there any hope my site will come back, or should I start building a new site?

Note: I have not made any changes to my site, and I don't have those stings at the end of my URLs.

[reseller]

I had recently problems with 4 pages which appeared suddenly as supplemental results when run command site:www.mysite.dk

4 pages showed up with strings. Wrote about it in my post on Aug 22.

msg #:40
[webmasterworld.com...]