Pages dropped dramatically in rankings

[punta]

Recently, a web site that was doing very well (top 3 positions on page 1) in Google on a number of keywords has dropped from the top positions on most keywords (I can't find the site at all now, it's certainly not in the first 5 pages).

Just before this happened, I made the following changes...

I removed the google noarchive tag.
(This was to make google show the cache on its listings)

I added a last-modified header
(The last modified header radomly returns a date between 1 and 60 minutes before the time the page is viewed) - I did this to see if google would show a fresh tag.

I added some headers to stop browsers caching the page. These were as follows:

Cache-control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
I also set the Expires header to return a date in the past.

I made those changes on the Friday and on the Monday, the pages wern't ranking highly any more. Google had indexed the home page and the home page cache was showing when I did a search foir my site (using site: in Google)

Because of the drastic drop in ranking, I undid a lot of the changes. The only things still remaining are:

The google noarchive tag
The Cache-control: no-cache header

However, despite the google cache showing the version of the page after these changes, the rankings are still taking a hit.

My toolbar PR is still 3 as it has been for a long time

Does anyone know why my pages might have dropped and how can I get them back to where they were in the rankings?

[seofreak]

if it was because of the changes u made, your listings should be back as they were next monday .. if not .. then most likely you are loosing PR .. how? sites linking u have also experienced the same.

[plasma]

I added a last-modified header
(The last modified header radomly returns a date between 1 and 60 minutes before the time the page is viewed) - I did this to see if google would show a fresh tag.

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL

[seofreak]

haha ya .. funny indeed.

[djgreg]

hehe ;-) pretty nice idea.

punta:
Same thing with one of my sites. One day number 2 for a important keyword next day gone from index.
It is gone from the index since about 10 days now. I hope it will be included at #2 next time the site is crawled. I , too made changings in the site, but I don't think they were concerning the ranking.

greg

[Jakpot]

Starting monday there has been a huge upheavel in a large number of the SERPS I monitor

[wanna_learn]

Jakpot
agree with you
Lots of changes on SERP!

[punta]

Is it possible that this may be related to the Florida update?

[mcavill]

> Is it possible that this may be related to the Florida update?

I think that's a likely contender

[punta]

When did the update start? I noticed these changes on the 10th of November. Was this before Florida started?

Am I likely to get my top rankings back or should I jump out of the window now?

[James_Dale]

Welcome to Florida - sounds like you're in for a bumpy ride. You'll probably be better off waiting for a month then checking again. There is nothing you can do except hope :)