Still no1 for main term - all long tail gone

[nippi]

3 days ago, my main site traffic tanked, and a rankings checks saw it still at NO.1 for its main term on google au, though it had dropped out of google.com

Also, all long tail searches were gone, from google.com and google.com.au

Page rank is fine, no change, and number of pages indexed is the same.

Any one else had this happen? Did you work out why?

[CainIV]

The long and short answer right now might the significant update that still appears to be going on. While I would always investigate the issue thoroughly, I would place my bets on waiting another week to two before looking at any wholesale changes, since it is very difficult to make heads or tales of what we see in the current index

[nippi]

yes - but has anyone had this happen?

[tedster]

This is a new phenenon to me, Nippi. The reverse is relatively common - big word traffic goes away leaving only long-tail.

Have you done some drill-down research? That is, identify some long-tail terms that were bringing you traffic, as well as what the target page was on your site? It's the only way I can think of to get more data on the situation.

[nippi]

What I am thinking is my site is just so far ahead of the opposition on the main term, that a small sitewide penalty has still left it at number 1 for this term.

ON the long tail however.... it was far less strong - thus the penalty has hit them.

Note - I have lost my rankings on .com totally even for my main term, though still at no.1 on .com.au

[AG4Life]

I've noticed that my higher ranking keywords haven't had a huge shift in SERPs, but my lower ones have had more drastic changes, including many of the "single internal link" pages disappearing from the index (and Google Webmaster Tools). So this may be similar to what you're experiencing.

I posted more on the apparent disappearance of links in this thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[CainIV]

Nippi we would need much more data in order to get a hint as to what might have happened. There is more than one possible scenario whereby internal pages of a website might fall in search:

-Changes in taxonomy / linking structure / internal links
-Changes to deep links (although generally the effects would be more gradual)
-Errors in pages

And there is even the possibility in this update that changes in how Google scores pages based on query semantics could affect how those pages ranked.

How far did those internal / long tails fall in rankings?