Vast Rank – A drastic drop in Google SERP

Edit: I posted an update to my findings here.

Vast Rank was steadily growing since its launch (a month ago) and last week was at its peek with a lot of organic (search) traffic from Google.

I saw this drop start on Saturday, October 25th and as a result I have started to dig into the Google Webmaster Guidelines and the world of SEO.  It looks like Google has algorithms that determine whether your site is “spammy”, and may penalize a site that it thinks is spam.  Since Vast Rank is so new and has a fairly low Page Rank, I am concerned I may have fallen prey to this algorithm.

The tough part about all of this is Google may or may not tell you if you are under one of these penalties.  I believe this is so that people can not use these warnings to reverse engineer their algorithms.

For the most part, I am hoping that my major drop in SERP is because my site is barely a month old.  However, I am taking a serious look at Vast Rank to see where I can improve things.  Here are my top tasks:

• Create accurate last mod dates in my SiteMap for all College Profiles and for the ratings & comments pages
• Make sure my title Tags are unique
• Review all meta description tags

The accurate last mod dates are going to be the most challenging but should only take a few hours to get it all setup.

Edit: I posted an update to my findings here.