Change in your rankings

when does it hurt?

[Reno]

Many of the threads here deal with Google penalties and "punishment". As is always the case with these sort of things, what we say and what we mean depends on how we understand the words. So I was wondering when does a shift in your rankings get you worried?

I think of it as 4 possible states:

Minor shift -- I go from #7 for a core keyword phrase to #17 -- from page 1 to page 2;

Moderate shift -- from #7 to #27 -- from p. 1 to p. 3;

Major shift -- from #7 to #37 -- p.1 to p. 4;

Death Valley -- if I go from #7 to #57 -- p.1 to p.6 -- then I have all but disappeared.

The minor and moderate shifts I can attribute to changes in the algo, however if I get a major shift (or even worse -- I "disappear"), then I cannot help but wonder if some sort of penalty is being applied (Google of course refuses to provide any clue).

Does this seem like a reasonable scale? How do you see it?

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[BigDave]

It never worries me. I don't keep track of rankings, I keep track of traffic. On my big sites, I don't have any keyphrases that ever hit more than 1% of my traffic, and the top ones change monthly. Not much point in worrying about where individual terms rank.

I get concerned if traffic from Google drops more than 50% from its high, for more than 2 weeks. This has happened once each on two sites.