The only reason I had ranked so well was because of my application of SEO techniques. My blog is about exercise and nutrition, so the acai posts fit the niche. I don’t spam. Therefore I have no idea why I was penalize so severely. This is a real pain in the neck.

After reading your post I feel very familiar with the situations you describe. You are absolutely right when you say that one of the first reactions is going into “panic mode”, you definitely get to the point to feel very bad about losing traffic from google and not knowing the reasons is very sad…

Well, I guess I’ll have to wait in the next few days and hope that my site gets back to normal.

My site went down for a while recently and my Google traffic disappeared–in fact, I can’t find any evidence of my site in Google at all. Previously I had been getting a significant portion of my traffic from search, and now I’m down to just a hundred or so hits a day (from folks who are directly typing in my URL–none from Google).

I just re-submitted my site to Google and I hope that that speeds things along, but your post re-affirms what I was thinking–don’t panic, just be patient and things will be restored in time. Just keep on working to improve the site and work on cultivating the community. Then when my site does get indexed again, I’ll be ready for the influx of traffic!

This is why it’s a good thing to write a blog that you’re passionate about–even when the audience semi-disappears, you’re still motivated to keep on plugging along.

Anyway, thanks for this post–it’s very re-assuring! :-)

This has just recently within weeks happened to my blog: Pursed Lips .net.

We used to do okay, then for a while we were on page 3 of results. Now, I can’t find myself, although we’re supposed to be PR 5. In the last 100 visitors, we’ve gotten many Yahoo! hits, 2 MSN, and 1 Google Images.

It’s odd because we are getting somewhat fewer visitors daily than our highest, but what’s worse is that we’re in a rut. We (Pursed Lips) just never did well with Google.

So I read your steps, and I did the Spring Clean. WOW, it needed that. It looks somehow 10 x more professional from the smallest spruces.

That’s all I can really do for tonight. I’m also really wondering if I’m even on Google at all. I search for myself and don’t get it. If I search for my URL what is supposed to appear? It seems it’s the same thing from before the domain was really indexed. And was there a recent Google update in the beginning of June 2006? (It’s odd, one other blog started doing extremely well at the end of May.)

It’s strange, but I never freaked out!

Of course, my blog covers a wide range of subjects, each of which has its own RSS feed, so I tend to get a widely varied audience of information seekers (some of the search terms I get are horrendous as you might imagine with my blogs being named what it is.

I believe that Google’s algorhythm is a pendulum which will swing back the other way soon enough, so your advice of chilling out, making your site more user-friendly, and continuing to develop quality content is sound and much appreciated, Darren.

And anyway I don’t see any reasons that this traffic stop from google, probably you’re in sandbox again !

We launched a Reality TV website back in August. Google didn’t pick it up then at all, but we found that after a bedding down period, MSN search was sending quite a bit of traffic our way. It turned out that we were ranking exceptionally well for the names of popular tv show contestants.

Despite gaining page rank in Google, the results are still pretty poor.

On the flip side, MSN ran an article at the weekend about the X-Factor show which linked names to MSN searches. People clicking through on the names got our site as top result in MSN and visited the site. Traffic skyrocketted!

So, maybe don’t put all your eggs in one search engine either….

But I will try to remember to take it with a grain of salt (as we say in the States.) Google giveth, and Google taketh away. I’m also seeing a big upsurge in MSN traffic.

Who knew?

But traffic has been affected only slightly as at the same time it moved up in the rankings for the same terms at Yahoo and MSN….

I don’t plan to change anything, it’s a solid site with loyal readers – income is still about the same, and I have a feeling that in a few weeks it will be back where it was before the update….it’s happened before and I have finally just decided there is no point in driving myself crazy trying to figure out what to do about it….Google is n control….not me……

However, mid way through the update I get pretty annoyed at the way my site got dropped along way down the rankings, it affected referrals by about a 85% – not good when google drives alot of traffic to your site.

The plus points – I did some refinements, added some more content, looked at MSN and yahoo referrals and waited it out.

Its a good opportunity to take alook at what you are doing and do some refinements without totally reworking your site. The keyword here is tweaking – don’t go overboard because you don’t know if the changes you are making will affect the rank, or if google is just levelling out.

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, as my mum likes to say – don’t rely soley on google, and don’t rely soley on adsense. And don’t commit everything to just one site, try and have a portfolio of sites with diverse topics that means you can cover the loses of one site if it drops and stays dropped.

Too many people see an increase in traffic as an immediate increase in income. I see it as a long-term small pay-raise for the rest of my life.

Every cent that comes in from my sites after taxes goes directly into my investments. That in turn increases my investment income.

No, it’s nowhere near as much fun to put $15,000 into an investment as it is to go out and spend it, but every time I do that I give myself the equivalent to a $1/hour pay raise that lasts forever!

This way, Google doesn’t affect my pay, even if they dump my site completely for a few months. I just don’t get any pay increases during that time.

Of course, you have to live below your means while you build that nest egg, but it really isn’t all that hard when you set your mind to it.

Recently I posted a short checklist of things you can do to get a new site off the ground on my site ( http://www.boydcreative.net/1/my-new-site-checklist/ ). If you have suffered a drop in rankings, pop over and have a read through. There’s plenty you can do now, so that when you are back in favour with Google you will be stronger than before.