Increase in PR.

[maxlazermarketing]

I?ve got an Insurance website. Optimization is going on for past few months. Initially my site use to rank high for certain competitive keywords, but suddenly in the month of December, my site has dropped SERP?s beyond 100 for those keywords. Therefore, please provide the reasons for this sudden drop in SERP. It would be great, if you could share your experiences in this regard.

Thanks in advance for your contribution.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Only 'the Google' knows for sure.

Sorry I know it's hard when your site drops but it's hard to know why - there could be many reasons. Many times it's just a bump in the algo and you may come back up in just a few days.

That happened to me a couple years ago. I was TOTALLY dropped and lost almost all my traffic. It was devastating! People strongly cautioned me not to make any site changes and urged me to just hang on. Sure enough after about 2 weeks my rankings all came back.

So if you're sure you have not done anything that's against Google's webmaster guidelines, then just hold tight and cross your fingers that you come back.

 

[djbaxter]

So if you're sure you have not done anything that's against Google's webmaster guidelines, then just hold tight and cross your fingers that you come back.

On the other hand, a large and sudden drop like you describe could indicate some sort of penalty if you have strayed outside Google's definitions of accepted webmaster practices. Have you been buying links? Selling links? Used any other strategies not Google approved?

 

[Joseph Ratliff]

I?ve got an Insurance website. Optimization is going on for past few months. Initially my site use to rank high for certain competitive keywords, but suddenly in the month of December, my site has dropped SERP?s beyond 100 for those keywords. Therefore, please provide the reasons for this sudden drop in SERP. It would be great, if you could share your experiences in this regard.

Thanks in advance for your contribution.

Also, don't lose sight of who you're really writing for...and it's NOT Google.

It's people.

Google (and the others like MSN, Yahoo, etc...) will be shifting toward a more "social" nature with their search...as evidenced by Google testing a "social search" feature where the user will be able to "customize" their search results.

So...the big point is...you're writing for people...not SERP's. Use your keywords and such, but I would focus more on creating content that is worth being spread around virally by social networks etc...then SERP's don't have as much influence on your business.

Hope that helps, perhaps in a different way than you were expecting.

 

[Piree]

The 2 reasons I could think of are:

1. Google gave u a penalty for link exchanging or blackhat seo

2. Bad communication between google datacenters when they crawled your site.

So I suggest you wait a few days and see if you get higher in SERP again, else I would go find out why google gave you a penalty.

 

[djbaxter]

Google won't usually tell you if or why a penalty has been applied. That policy is so the information doesn't simply help black-hatters to get better at being black-hatters.

 

[Piree]

Depends on what you've done minstrel, if you do alot of blackhat seo they probably won't tell you. But if it's just a small thing you did they might response to your email.

 

[jcorkern]

There are a lot of times when Google will impliment a "test" algo, review the results and need time to compare them, this is why Linda had the results she did. I always give a couple weeks before making changes, as long as you know you are following the straight and narrow.

There are only a few rules that Google will enforce to punish a site. And most of the sites I have seen have not pushed these buttons. Usualy when you lose rankings over 2 weeks it is because you have lost some key links since they have the overall largest affect on the results of a site in Google.

You have to consider that there are a certain precentage of sites that do not keep their sites, just give it up, and that causes links (sometimes high pr links) to suddenly disappear, and if you are in a competetive market, as little as a handfull of links that have had some age on them and been linking to your site for months are gone, and it is a major blow to your site in the results.

I just watched a lot of.edu results go away on the payday loan field over the last 3 weeks for blackhat practices, students running server-side scripts and google laid the smackdown on them, so some edu links may have taken a hit.

If you know you have done nothing wrong, just stay the course and you will come out fine.

 

[maxlazermarketing]

Thanks for sharing your valuable info. Provided information is of great use.