Major Ranking Losses on 2008 June 4 - 5

[confuscius]

I can now join the catastrophic loss club! UK site, PR6, rock solid rankings, 400k pages indexed, fast loading - 90% loss of traffic since 2 days ago. Last time the site went AWOL was early February for a couple of days.

Looking up what I used to rank for approx 20,00 medium to long phrases then all top listing just disappeared BUT results can now only be described as awful - in fact on one query results 11-20 contained sites from Poland, Germany, Czech, .info and not a single .com or .co.uk - when will Google admit that they really screwed up big time this time?

As my site is a .com hosted on uk servers then it seems that I have now moved to the index for Mars. Time to move to the dark side methinks rather than stay in the Google lottery.

[edited by: tedster at 7:08 pm (utc) on June 6, 2008]
[edit reason] moved from [webmasterworld.com...] [/edit]

[doughayman]

One other observance of mine. On the major site where I have exhibited major traffic loss, my informational "money page" (containing affiliate links) has been getting spidered by Google at a much higher rate than normal (usually twice in a 24 hour period). This is quite bizarre - normally, it was spidered about once a week or so, before these recent events.

Of note, is that within 12 hours of spidering, this "money page" (which was normally Page 1 for many search terms), rises to the middle of Page 3 (for these same terms), only to fall off to Page 4 or Page 5, after another 12 hours elapses. This observance is repeatable since Black Wednesday (June 4th). So, it appears that the spidering (and perhaps re-indexing) initially lifts this pages' ranking, and then some additionally applied filters, knock it down once again.

[tedster]

Doug, that increase in spidering of the affeected page is an interesting observation. Thanks.

At this point we're two weeks past the first big swipe of losses, and so far we have not found a clear pattern. In fact, this thread is starting to lose focus and even attract posts that are not about the dates June 4-5 any more.

We'll have this thread for future reference, in case insight does show up. But for now, I'm locking this thread.

Let's take further discussion to the regular thread June 2008 Google SERP Changes [webmasterworld.com]