Sudden huge drops in traffic

[realmaverick]

I have a 3 year old website. PR6 since the recent update.

On June 15th, there was a sudden 75% decrease in traffic, which maintained through to June 28th when it very suddenly shot back up again to previous levels.

Then July 9th another sudden and big drop.

The drops were from Google traffic.

There has been no active link building on the website in the past 6 months.

I've checked analytics and other than the actual drop in traffic, I cannot find any clues. Webmaster tools is the same. Very few errors, sitemaps are in tact etc.

I'm not aware of any big algo changes on those dates.

Any ideas what else could be at play here?

[kidder]

"active link building" Well that may be a clue right there, how does the link profile look? Were you aggressive getting to the PR6? How many spammy looking links do you have pointing at the site?

I've had one site doing the Yo Yo thing for a few months now and I suspect its link related, it was stable for 4 years until we "acquired" a batch of links.

[Planet13]

Are the Yo Yo effects consistent with a link building penalty?

While I understand that the algo is so complex that we can't predict 100% how things will work, I also was under the assumption that when sites or specific keywords are penalized, their rankings would be diminished consistently over a set period of time (90 days, for example).

Is the Yo Yo effect of penalties a new development? Or has it usually been that way?

[indyank]

I don't think what is happening now are the result of penalties...it is all algorithmic...

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

The algo is definitely at work, constantly. Some of the results are funny too. If you're looking for a cool 5 letter domain name... "find 5 letter domain name" without quotes = Cialis at #1

It's ugly right now so it stands to reason established sites are taking hits.

[walkman]

The algo is definitely at work, constantly. Some of the results are funny too. If you're looking for a cool 5 letter domain name... "find 5 letter domain name" without quotes = Cialis at #1

WOW! I spent a few minutes trying to understand it. The page was hacked and Google indexed the hacked page, so it looks like G totally ignored the content. Just relied on domain rep and url?

[indyank]

There are several, several examples right now.

[indyank]

Just relied on domain rep and url?

Google doesn't often use the latest cache for its ranking.