Reason for rankings drop Dec 28th

[speedshopping]

We are currently investigating why our site suffered a mass de-rank on dec 28th and have yet to recover - we are suspecting that our new server has been experiencing continuous high pocket loss - can this be linked to a drop in rankings?

[Sorin]

@tedster,

Nope, nothing specific. All search traffic down, on all the pages at the same time, from around 2000 a day to about 35. site: operator results still has domain root at the top and when you Google the site name it comes on the first position. The Google organic search however is lower than both Google and Bing which was never the case.

I really don't know what to do...no clue what triggered it since I never performed any SEO...

[Planet13]

@Sorin:

1. No, It is a technology blog oriented to gadget reviews

I hate to ask this question, but... is the material on your blog all unique and original? Or is it the same material that is often found on other review blogs.

Again, I am sorry to ask this question, but there are an awful lot of review sites that seem to compile reviews from other sites and then wonder why they don't rank.

Also regarding your traffic drop: Are you measuring traffic Google Analytics or with server logs?

(I ask because I had a mysterious drop in bounce rate on one site using google analytics).

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I received a Dec 28th/29th boost in visitors/rankings from Google, on par with what I lost last March. The two primarily content scraping sites that had been hovering around mine in the rankings seem to have dropped back to page 3-4. Mine has 100% unique, ie:written by me and not re-written from anything else, content and images, if that's of help.

[Sorin]

@Planet13

I understand the reason for the question. The answer is no, the articles are original, based on the products I own, and the reviews are written from scratch and more detailed that most other reviews you can find on the internet. Several times my reviews were the first for important products on the net and they brought me thousands of visitors daily. The pictures are also taken by me. The only non-original material is when I attach occasionally the press release (in the articles that discuss technology press releases).

Now about the material being original, aside the reviews which are both unique and original, I also discuss about technology news which are often the same other blogs are discussing as well. I always write the articles from scratch though, using my own words.

[edited by: Sorin at 7:52 am (utc) on Jan 17, 2011]

[Sorin]

@Planet13

For the second question, the traffic drop is evident in both GA and server logs.

[Shaddows]

Sorin, are you covering CES?

If not, I imagine you are losing out to Minty Fresh blogs in your niche- unavoidable if you only write about products you own, and aren't a pre-release tester.

[maximillianos]

Are you bring scraped by a higher ranking spam site?

This timing also seems to correlate to the end of the holiday shopping season. I wonder you are a victim of a giant dial being adjusted at the Gplex after they returned to the office after Xmas?

[Sorin]

@Shaddows

True, but I would expect a slope in traffic decrease. Sometime around 7:00AM on 28th GA shows a huge drop in traffic that never recovered, like somebody turned of the water. It is obvious that something has changed on Google's side.
And beside that, I got a huge hit on How-to articles not related to CES or reviews, articles that used to be at the top of SERP.

@maximillianos
It might be, although I am not selling anything...But if Google changed something, I have no clue what to do other than work as usual...

Do you know of a penalty that would de-rank most of the articles but while searching for the domain name it would still show up un the first position?

[triggerfinger]

As of the event at the end of December I seem to have around 40,000 page ... It strikes me that there was a major rejigging of the kind of edge case pages that are allowed into the main index and I wonder if some people haven't noticed because in a lot of cases they are likely to be fairly low traffic pages?

I follow the indexation of several megasite competitors, and sometime in the few months Google's site: operator has been returning increasingly large results. I can tell from sites I have access too that many of these results can only be pages that are either duplicitous (parameterized URL's, etc), or noindexed/nofollowed. It seems that unless you are physically keeping Googlebot from pages, they will be in the index, or at least be a statistic in the site: operator.

I have a spreadsheet where I keep the data, and you can see every competitor's site saturation rise over the past 3 months. One site:example.com returns 750 Million results!

[Sorin]

I started to see some traffic back after the huge drop on Dec 28th. Not at the previous levels but it is a good sign. Most of my articles started to rank higher at the same time.

[speedshopping]

Our site ranking came back yesterday for all of it's keywords (thousands of them), but at 9pm, it dropped out again as per dec 28th - can anyone explain why we are in then out? Cheers

[indyank]

because google is now throwing the dice around..let them finish the game and then you will know where you are :)