Can adding AdSense for search to your entire web site decrease your SERPs at all on Google? The reason I ask is because I run <snip>. Up until September 29th we got quite a bit of traffic from Google. About 9% of our traffic came from Google. However, since September 29th our traffic has dramatically decreased from Google -- to around 5% (or minus 15,000 to 20,000+ visitors per day from Google).

Our placement for a popular keyword like "cheat codes" has dropped from where we were first or second to sixth. That is just one of many examples. Basically our ranking for a ton of popular keywords dropped by either a few ranking positions, a page or two, or completely disappeared from the Google index.

What I don't understand is why this happened when the only change we made recently was adding Google "AdSense for search" (we added it to our site on September 25th) and our PageRank has actually gone from a 5 to a 6 recently. We have had a good ranking with Google for many years with all the keywords we now rank much lower on.

Over the past few months some of our keyword positioning on Google have really been fluctuating, but after a few days our positions for most if not all of those keywords would be back to normal. During the past few months our traffic had never really significantly dropped either, like it has now. But all of a sudden since last Friday we are getting 15,000 to 20,000 less visitors from Google per day because of SERPs on tons of keywords.

What do you think is going on and is there anything we can do about it? Does any of this make sense? I really hope some of you can help me out and give me your opinion on what might have happened and what we should do about it. Thank you very much!

-Dave

[edited by: martinibuster at 4:29 am (utc) on Oct. 10, 2006]
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