Sudden drop in SERPS this week

[Steve Morris]

Hi I've had one of my sites drop about 150 places in the last few day for most of my long-tail search terms. Has anyone experienced this in the last week or so? I found this post, seems its not just me
SERPs dropped partially. Strange! - Webmaster Help

 

[Rob_TID]

Most of my new sites go great for about 2 or 3 weeks then drop majorly like 70 places then pop back up after about 6 weeks.

I don't really worry too much about it to be honest.

 

[sunkist219]

Yep - this happened to me last week too. It's almost like they update their system every so often and it's either really good or really bad for your ranking. From what I heard, it only happens with new sites. How old is your site?

 

[djbaxter]

Actually, Google updates their search results on an ongoing basis (a process known as "everflux"), but they're also ferquently tweaking their search ranking algorithms either to make the search results more relevant or to thwart "blac hat" and "gray hat" webmasters trying to push their sites artifically high.

An average established web site won't usually notice huge fluctuations but new sites may fluctuate quite a bit for a while and sometimes whole sectors of the web will see large shifts where Google tries to crack down on specific shady SEO practices. For example, that happened a couple of years back for real estate sites and about a year or so ago for web directories.

 

[Steve Morris]

Yep - this happened to me last week too. It's almost like they update their system every so often and it's either really good or really bad for your ranking. From what I heard, it only happens with new sites. How old is your site?

The site is newish but the domain is about four years old ( I didn't know it had history before I registered it) 2 days ago it popped back up in the serps. At one point I wasn't even ranking for my domain name.

So if anyone else has a sudden drop in the SERPS best thing to do is not to panic ( unless your site totally disappears from the index ) sit tight and monitor your pages , check your logs and make sure that your still being spiderd by Google and try to keep link building.

Unless you have done some sort of black-hat tactics you should see yourself pop back up within a few weeks

 

[Rob_TID]

Glad to hear it's back

 

[Rob_TID]

FYI - this seems to be a fairly typical keyword ranking progression for a new site in my experience:

Start low, jump up, dump down, then come back.

 

[Steve Morris]

FYI - this seems to be a fairly typical keyword ranking progression for a new site in my experience:

Start low, jump up, dump down, then come back.

Good info to know ,

 

[Ron Killian]

I've had a couple drops, but those were my fault. Other than that, been holding steady and moving up.

For sure you can't panic, least give it a few days.