Visits dropping 80%

Same PR & URLs doing site:mydomain.com

[Biggus_D]

Yesterday our visits dropped 80% and today seems to be just as bad or even worse.

PageRank hasn't changed in the latest update and site:mydomain.com shows almost 7,000 URLs, as usual.

On the other hand Yahoo works fine.

We haven't changed anything in more than a year so I'm kind of lost trying to figure out what's going on.

Any idea?

Thank you,

[tedster]

Hello Biggus and welcome to the forum.

It sounds like you lost ranking position for one or more important search terms. Do you keep track of search engine referer information?

[Biggus_D]

We use Google Analytics.

24-01-2007: 17k pages, 4k visits, 84% from Google.com
25-01-2007: 7k pages, 1k visits, 64% from Google.com
26-01-2007: even worse

The site has more than 2 years and was growing slowly until last month that took a step back (I think due the Christmas season), but starting January was fine again... until yesterday.

[Biggus_D]

Ouch!

I've just checked our most read article, searching the keywords from the title. Like searching GREAT + STUFF from the article title "my great stuff".

Well, it shows us in LAST position, on the 800 range and just before the end.

[Biggus_D]

And doing the same search just on our country we get position 143 from 333 results.

[tedster]

Well, it shows us in LAST position, on the 800 range and just before the end.

Sounds like these are the threads.for you:

Google's 950 penalty [webmasterworld.com] - part1
Google's 950 penalty [webmasterworld.com] - part2

[northweb]

So...more and more seem to be joining the penalty.

game face on huh google

[skweb]

I have identical situation to yours - for me it is a repeat of what happened on 1/14 but I came back 3 days later stronger than ever. Yesterday, 5K visitors gone in a heartbeat and right now I am seeing an index that is like I saw on 1/14. I am simply hoping that Google will fix the errors and bring back the rankings.

[Biggus_D]

I was reading those long posts but I'm unable to tell...

Is it my fault or a Google bug?

What have I done (or haven't done) to deserve this?

Because we aren't so SEO smart and we haven't done anything lately, for example our URLs are plain ugly due PHP, nothing SEF.

[Bewenched]

Boy and I seeing alot of ebay listings coming up at the top for so many key words. Now .. how on earth can an auction with only a 7 day life span get ranked number one? I know that ebay and google have an "advertising agreement" it's really on keywords that have no other sponsored links, but to pull favorites with a brand new auction is absolutely absurd. If I wanted to see paid for placement links I'd got to yahoo.

[tedster]

What have I done (or haven't done) to deserve this?

It's not clear right now. Some urls may "deserve" it and some may be receiving collateral damage, just unintended vicitims of Google's actual intention. But the phenomenon seems to be keyword specific rather than a penalty on across an entire domain. So your traffic may be too dependent on one search term, and the way your site or your backlinks use that term now runs afoul of some new part of Google's ranking analysis.

[Biggus_D]

Not really dependent on a few words. It's a news site updated daily.