Well, a site that I look after has always ranked EXTREMELY well for the keywords that I target, but as of the past few days it seems that the page's search ranking has taken a severe hit - something that I have never experienced before in my couple years of web development. Initially, I thought that it might just be a Google update, but it appears that the update is more long-term/permanent.

Anybody else experienced this as of late? I know last year, funnily enough just before Christmas, there appeared (although I can't confirm) to be a change in the page rank algorithm which sent my site flying to the top of the search results, and I had not even changed anything at the time, nor added link exchanges. Am I experiencing the opposite effect?

I'd like to hear what you guys think...

GCS584

My website moved from first page to fourth page as well

Google recently went on a vendetta to penalize sites that are selling links. That means that links from these site have been devalued, which has taken a toll on sites that used directories and other types of paid links. It doesn't matter if the directory offered free links. Any type of link building sites that they identified were penalized or devalued. Even links from most social networking sites, such as Digg, are believed to be devalued.

If you used these types of services for building links to your site, that might explain the problem.

Yes we should only buy links from google via adword, I hope someone sues google for this monopoly.

I am of the belief that Google doesn't OWE us traffic. We should appreciate them and thank them for the free traffic that they are gracious enough to send to us. If they want us to do certain things (such as taking down our paid links that negatively affect the search results for everyone), and in exchange they'll send us more traffic, I, for one, would be happy to oblige. The alternative is that they will send us less traffic for free that we, most likely, don't deserve in the first place.