Was my site hit by the latest algo change?

[santah]

Aight, so the website in question is fairly new.

Created it last June, and it got it's first page rank (3) when google finally did a PR Update a month or so ago.

By now, it's a pretty well established website, a leader in it's niche, with tons of sites and forum posts linking to it.

More than 80% of my visitors are loyal (returning) users, and the site gets thousands of hits per day from Google and other search engines.

I have google analytics installed, so google is aware of all that.

There is no adsense or other ads on that site.

Now, 2-3days ago, something happened.

The site lost it's site links that google showed, the PR was dropped to 0 (from 3) and in webmaster tools, the Crawl Rate and the Crawled Pages per day dropped to 1/3 to what they were the previous day.

All of that happened in a single day, so I'm pretty sure something is up.

The traffic google is sending, however, have not changed drastically.

The only thing I can think of is that my site got hit by the latest algo change, although I don't have Adsense and most of my traffic is from referring sites and returning visitors.

Anyone experienced something like this?

[tedster]

If Google is still sending the same amount of traffic, then you haven't not affected by this recent update. And the toolbar PageRank number is not something to worry about if your traffic stays the same. Also crawl rates will vary at different times, and sometimes by quite major changes. Again, it means more about Google's available computing cycles than your rankings, which sound like they are cooking right along.

It is interesting that you no longer had sitelinks, but you didn't lose traffic. Makes me wonder how valuable they really are in practical terms.

[goodroi]

Hi santah,

I agree with tedster if your traffic levels are the same then you are probably not hit by this algo update.

You may want to look at your top keywords from Feb 1-Feb 22. Then compare it with your top keywords from Feb 23-Today. This can help to identify if any specific keywords took a hit.

As with any site I would continue working on getting unique content, boosting inbound links and increasing your social presence. These general steps will help a website to weather any algo update.

[aristotle]

Look at the Search Queries section of Webmaster Tools. The chart will show if there has been a sudden drop in traffic from Google.

[TheMadScientist]

I posted something similar in the update thread yesterday, but imo this is an 'old school' update, meaning: they turned some of the systems off during the update / rollout.

[santah]

I had to wait for 2-3 days for the queries data to update (as it's usually a few days behind).

Now that it's current (latest data is from 25th), it shows the exact same number of clicks, and slight drop in the impressions count.

But that data was never correct for me. The number of clicks I see in that panel is usually about 1/10 of what I see in google analytics as traffic sent from google, so I never trusted / monitored that metric.

[santah]

Just wanted to give a quick update, that the site (today) got it's PR of 3 back.