The same thing just happened to me today.

I have a very similar site but a different subject.

My site is an aerial photographs site - www.webbaviation.co.uk

For the last few years I ranked between 1 and 7 for "aerial photographs UK" and now Im no where.

For the last few years when you narrowed the search doen to a specific northern england town name I ranked no1 as I am the only website with aerial phtographs of that town eg "aerial photographs of Bolton" or "aerial photographs of Liverpool" Now I'm no where to be found.

Even searching for my business name I'm still well down on the list.

I have no other source of customers or business so until I'm listed again I'm unemployed.

The worst thing is most of the stuff google lists is irrelevant to someone searching for an aerial photograph of their town.

Regards,

Jonathan Webb

Exactly the same happened in the Florida update you may remember to Google, many small and home businesses just dissapeared from the serps.

Unfortunately this is where all you can do is sit tight and see what happens in the next week or so. I know it's easy to say after the event but businesses really do need to spread there source of leads beyond Google. I know it's a massive factor but at least if you concentrate on getting some good rankins in MSN and Yahoo! you don't lose all your leads at once.

Perhaps you could start a low budget Google Adwords campaign to keep the leads coming in?

yep, I'm still listed OK in yahoo, and for now the google image search.

I always did badly in AOL. They don't like me and although I'm in their index I am very difficult to find and impossible in normal search for my area of content. Now its the same with Google.

Paid advertising isn't cost effective, selling photographs in the digital world is almost impossible as most people want them for free. I was relying heavily on the ad sense revenue.

My business was always marginal, I do it for the love of aerial photograaphy rather than the money. I sell one print for every 35000 page views, try working that on pay per click!

As I've done no major changes and there are no sneaky techniques on my website so I have the suspicion that perhaps google does it on purpose to sell paid inclusion---- build them up and knock them down.

My options now are
1 rebuild the site to remove anything they might not like- not an option with 3800 pages and not a clue as to what might have offeneded googlebot.

2.build doorway pages on a seperate host which is a strange solutionn as thats the very thing that gets you barred.

3.start all over again with an un connected site on a new host with no cross links.

4. get as many links from other sites as possible in the hope of either replacing the traffic or rebuilding page rank.

I will do 3 and 4 I think. Plus put on a suit and go round factories as a salesman like the non web photographers

As I've done no major changes and there are no sneaky techniques on my website so I have the suspicion that perhaps google does it on purpose to sell paid inclusion---- build them up and knock them down.

That's not the case, if Google didn't change their algorithm then it wouldn't be the best search engine in the world. OK so some may say its results are not as relevant these days but the reason you see chnages such as your own site is because rules get changed to keep 1 step ahead of the spammers. Whilst you are not a spammer you also cannot expect to build a site and have it rank highly for your keywords forever without any further work.

My options now are
1 rebuild the site to remove anything they might not like- not an option with 3800 pages and not a clue as to what might have offeneded googlebot.

I haven't looked at your site as yet as I am pretty busy but will check it out later so I can't comment on whether you need to change things around. Bottom line is as long as you stick to the basics of SEO you should have no problem.

2.build doorway pages on a seperate host which is a strange solutionn as thats the very thing that gets you barred.

This is against Google's TOS and in my opinion a complete waste of time. Your time would be better spent improving the main site.

3.start all over again with an un connected site on a new host with no cross links.

Again without looking at your sites current state I can't comment but if your doing nothing wrong in terms of going against Google's TOS then this is also a pointless exercise.

4. get as many links from other sites as possible in the hope of either replacing the traffic or rebuilding page rank.

Link building from on-topic and authority sites is all part of a good SEO routine anyway so yes this would be a good idea regardless of how your current rankings are. If you can avoid just doing recipricol linking and get some quality one way links.

It sounds as though the business relies more on affiliate money than sales then i.e Adsense. I would definately look at getting some good quality links whcih will bring in the extra traffic your looking for. I don't know if you have a forum on the site but that is also a good way to pull extra traffic.

many thanks for your coments.
I think we both see it the same way.

The more I look at the search results the more they look different than normal. I think perhaps they have made a significant change to the algortithm. The title and heading tags don'ts seem to be as important as before. Previously the top ranking pages all had the search phrase in the title or at least some of it, now there are lots of high ranking pages where it only appears in the body of the text.... very strange.

After the last google dance I dropped to second page for my main term but then picked up half a page a week or so later when google seemed to have dropped some of the less relevant results. Maybe Ill move back up, but I've dropped a long way on most of them eg from no1 to no 107 for "aerial photographs of Liverpool"

I'll watch, read and wait before doing anything radical. Just seeking links for now.

Thanks once again for advice.

I'll watch, read and wait before doing anything radical. Just seeking links for now.

Exactly what I would do, I had a similar thing happen for a site which ranked top for years for a specific phrase. All of sudden one of the updates pushed it out into the top 100 somewhere. I basically did absolutely nothing and after about a month or 6 weeks it went bang right at the top again and still is there.

I'm not saying your guaranteed to go straight back but like you say, best thing to do is not do anything too drastic just yet.

No worries on the advice, I'll checkout your site later anyway.

How bizarre!

I just tried a search for "cooking holidays thailand" and the 7th listing worldwide is http://www.d-a-l.com/help/showthread...4332#post54332

This is one of the search terms I gave as an example. Why should this suddenly zoom up the Google results when I have not bounced back? I was number 1 result previously. This seems a bit sinister to me.

. . . and what makes it worse is the 11th and 12th listing for "cooking holidays thailand" go to this site:

www.bluediamondtravel.co.uk

I built this site and the company that owned it closed down. It has not been added to, changed or updated since October 2003 so where is the sense in what is going on?

Yep there are definately some major changes going on but what your seeing has happened many times to sites. The same happened to one of my sites before, it was a new site and I posted about it on another forum and then thread ranked higher than my site for some time. Your seeing a shake up and theres no telling what will come out the other end, all you can do is wait and see......