Back in October I saw a large drop in Vast Rank’s Google SERP. In other words, when people searched for certain terms where a Vast Rank page (normally a college profile) would appear on the first Google search result page for a few weeks, these same searches yielded the same Vast Rank college profile page to show up many pages into the Google search results.
At the time I was worried because I was unsure of what would happen next. This was the first time I really cared about SEO. When I worked at barnesandnoble.com, people would just show up and pump millions of dollars of products through my code a day. It was magic, and I thought, dam I am good! Well, the reality is they have a brand, and I do not!
If your site does not appear in Google Search results, it is pretty much 
death to your site if you depend on organic traffic. Google matters much less if you have a website that people have to use for their school, job, bank account or whatever. But when you depend on organic traffic, you rely on Google.
If your site drops in SERP, the Google webmaster tools do not tell you in general about any penalties on your site. I imagine that this is so that crafty little SEO experts can not reverse engineer some of Google’s algorithms. So during these times of doom and gloom for your site, you are pretty much left to looking at SEO discussion sites and the Google Webmaster Help discussion group.
Luckily, Vast Rank returned to Google’s search
results after a huge drop from October 26th, 2008 – November 5th, 2008. I am posting this to show other webmasters that there is hope if your new site suddenly disappears from Google search results. So take a deep breath, the world is not ending, and wait it out! I’m serious, take a deep breathe, and count 1000-1, 1000-2, 1000-3. Now Exhale. Calm yet? If not, go here, or keep reading, I have proof that there is hope.
Below is a screen screen shot from Vast Rank’s Google Analytics page. The screen shot shows traffic from launch day until today (notice the huge drop in traffic in October-November).
I updated quite a few things on Vast Rank during the downtime period: accurate sitemap last mod dates, unique title tags, better meta descriptions, etc. Some of these items were called out in the Google Webmaster Tools for Vast Rank, and other items were just common sense items that I needed to get to implementing (i.e. accurate last mod dates in the xml sitemap). However, I think the biggest reason I saw the huge drop was that Vast Rank was so new.
If you are a webmaster experiencing SERP drops, it would be great for you to post a comment so we can collectively share our experiences!
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Nice post!
I’m so glad you wrote this. Same thing happened to our site, and now I’ve noticed it occurs periodically on various keywords where we rank in the top 20. I wonder if it’s Google’s sensitivity testing, to see if the absence of a top link leads to a drop in click-through. The site always returns to the search results, in close to the same location as when it dropped.
My site has dropped completely off the SERP for my target keyword and fallen to the second page for a direct search of my site url. Its been 4 days now with no change but after reading this I have a bit of hope again that my site will return. I undid all my recent changes to the site thinking google penalized me for some reason because of it. Thanks for the insightful post!
Good read this article.
My website has dropped from the SERP suddenly from 28th of july.
It can still be found in the SERP though but the SE traffic dropped 95%
so visitor numbers have dropped seriously. I’m quite sick of the drop in SERP i must admit. I am working hard on the website and it is my top project so it’s hard to see it decline this way.
I hope my website will return back as I am working hard to put somthing good online.
Thank You very much to post this as this gives me alot of hope that my site will be back on top rankings as it dropped serp from 30k uvs per day to 6k uvs per day, I had used lots of facebook iframes and It may be the reason which caused this SERP dropping, but I have revert it back to how it was when my site was getting top results.
Thank You again for giving us hope.
I’ve recently done some changes in my homepage text and my SERP dropped.I left the same keyword density more or less, and the new text is much more informative and clear.This is the reward I get…
well, be carefull about your post, you’ll better be right about this, Il Be back and say thanks to you if my keywords targeting on google back. If Youre wrong ….thanks for teaching me to be patient…:)
@JERRY
You got new text and your serp dropped..hmmm
And now? Few weeks later you may rank good.right?Or still down?
I do have hope…thanks!
I didn’t change any content on my website — just went from a custom layout to a Blogger layout, as my site is hosted by Blogger. The layout change was a much-needed update, so I’m hoping traffic picks back up. Bummer…and my site had just started doing EXTREMELY well!
Our site had 4 low-traffic terms on page one of Google. Finally a high traffic term that had been rising over 3 months made it to position 10 ( female mannequin ). Then next day it was off the radar. Then the other ones all dropped, and they’ve all been below position 100 since :-/
seem thing happen to me yesterday, I have no idea what I should do. I have repost sitemap. and, as you post, just wait… and wait …
Hey, this does make me feel a tad better, but I still worry. Thanks for the article.