I had managed to rank in the top 10 results for a handful of keywords that were bringing in traffic and making sales on the site. Then suddenly on Thursday it all tanked.
It doesn’t appear to have received a “penalty,” but I don’t know why the sudden drop. I added a piece of content last week as well, it was original and written by me so I don’t think that was the problem. There are new links coming in every day so I don’t think it was that either.
I had really hoped that by the end of July this site would be starting to make a real income. Traffic was picking up, sales were starting to happen, and then it just suddenly fell.
So how long is too long to wait for a site to recover from a SERPs shift?
That is a really difficult question. The site isn’t banned from search engines results and it hasn’t be deindexed, so I am guessing that it will recover. But I don’t know if I have it in me to be patient about the whole thing.
Maybe it was just a tiny little algorithm update and things will be back to normal in a week or two. Maybe I was just ranking that high by matter of a fluke and I won’t be able to get back up to those positions.
I guess we’ll just wait and see. I think I’ll give it at least two weeks to see some movement back up. If you’ve had experience with a site tanking and recovering, I’d be glad to hear about it. Leave a comment below and share your story 😉
Transcriptionist, passionate cross stitcher, writer at heart, wife, mom, and finder of lost shoes… Loretta Oliver, married to the comic book geek of her dreams and mother of four amazing young men, has been working from home full time since 2001. With a busy transcription service business, a few niche sites, and a handful of other internet marketing projects on the go, the computer is always fired up and the ideas are always flowing.
Hey chick 🙂 There’s no evidence that a Panda dance took place on July 11th, but Matt Cutts did say (back in May) that Penguin 2.0 would be rolling sometime in the next few weeks. I haven’t dug into whether a lot of sites have been seeing changes, but it could be.
You could get Wordtracker’s free “SEO Made Simple” book that includes the Panda Survival Guide. http://www.karonlikes.com/wtseo
As for how long is long enough to wait… anybody’s guess. If it were me, I’d give it a week or two. Rankings bounce around all the time so this could just be a reshuffle.
Hi loretta
My bet is one of two things – and overly aggressive or populated affiliate link strategy or a penalty for bad back links. I’m not sure If you follow spencer Hawes at niche site pursuits but in his niche site project he ran into the same thing
Darren
Darren Thompson recently posted..How Do Inverter Generators Work ?
Many bloggers have the same problems. I had quite few sites tanked! Some of them had even high page rank. I guess you never know when the all mighty Google thinks…they seem like not even knowing what they are doing ..lol!
We just need to keep writing, keep building quality sites. From now an on…I do not rely only on search engines and in fact, paid traffic is faster and better… Have you experiment with paid traffic? What were your results?
Brett