A relatively short career even by Google standards?

i think you need some more traffic streams. a lot of my best performing pages have never been on the first page of the serps, but i get people to them in other ways, or by funnelling them from the pages they do land on.

if your income has gone just by dropping to position 15 then you are probably concentrating too much on one traffic source

OK, G is whacked out right now but regarding SEO, guess what, we've all seen rankings bounce up and down like a yo yo for years now, don't know if there's a name for it these days but we used to call it the Google Dance. It's definitely a crazier dance now with more variables and everyone seems to be experiencing it. I've seen similar symptoms to what you're describing in the last few days regarding CTR and so have others. The question is, what is to be learned from it and are a couple of days enough to draw any kind of conclusion? There are definitely some trends afoot this year and a ton of guessing going on. Seems webmasters here, instead of crawling under a rock should come out and continue to share their insights in response to this so perhaps we can draw some real conclusions and take appropriate action. It's kind of tough though when you can't talk about your niche because that is a major variable in understanding the problem from various perspectives. It's also difficult when we don't know if someone's drop in income might be due to questionable practices that are just now getting called into the light by Google. Google is definitely moving the bar. Moving it to where is the question?

Yeah, earning's not normal since Sunday. I don't know what's going on.

I didn't receive any messages from Adsense and I have NO policy violations.

Again, whereas before ALL of my sites we're in a good range between 1 and 8 on the FIRST page on numerous keywords, they have no dropped to 10-15 range for same keywords -- ALL IN ONE DAY, ON SUNDAY.

Now a bunch of blogs, the non-actual-news site examiner(dot com), and YT videos all rank above me.

Just stuff I wouldn't even want to see if I were searching my subject. There's not even a single dot-com on the first page for any of these search terms, just blogs.

Maybe things will get better, but this is the first time I've been "hit" with one of these Google changes/updates.

Seems webmasters here, instead of crawling under a rock should come out and continue to share their insights in response to this so perhaps we can draw some real conclusions and take appropriate action.

My sites did not bounce they dropped ... some of them to oblivion in the penguin spring of 2011. There has been no recovery whatsoever and no action that I have tried has proven to be "appropriate" in the 16 months since it happened. From this the only real conclusion I have been able to draw is that nothing will change what has happened to some sites. Whether they deserved it or not Google has killed them.

I have given up.

On Sunday, all of my sites (they are connected to one Google authorship acct) were nuked, dropping from 1-5 in SE rankings to 10-15.

[....]

I don't know what happened. Some kind of manual review.

How many sites went down? half? all of them? are they all hosted on the same server-ip? do all of them have organic traffic? or some feed from the traffic of a big one?

Being linked to the G+ account sounds like something to look upon.

Otherwise consider server problems, it happened before. Be it due to intermittent downtime or dirty ips due to bad neighbors. There must be some clue, did you post something around the week the problem appeared?

Happened to me, one drop 2011, further drop 2012, and only in early July 2013 did I bounce back. I'm now running 20% - 25% above 2012, still below 2011.

Keep working at it and it may bounce back.

Keep working at it and it may bounce back.

If I remember correctly, a few forum members reported traffic loss, did nothing to fix it except keep working and some algo update got the traffic back.

Same thing has happened to my sites..last couple of days went from top of page 1 to page 2 and beyond. Extremely frustrating.And these are in areas where competition is lacking.

@ explorador

"How many sites went down? half? all of them? are they all hosted on the same server-ip? do all of them have organic traffic? or some feed from the traffic of a big one?

Being linked to the G+ account sounds like something to look upon."

All the sites linked to the G+ account went down. All on the same server. All have organic traffic literally completely independent of each other (a trickle of traffic from links to the other sites I have at the bottom of each site).

So it is what it is. Total devastation.

I'm starting to think it was not a manual review, but something else. Like some kind of algo update.

The sites don't have very good backlinks -- they're decent -- but not great. I have a strong suspicion that is at issue.

Or, I notice a few keywords were more strongly affected than others, so I can't explain that. Why a few keywords took a smaller hit over others.

*Fingers crossed* it recovers.

My sites really delivered what people were looking for, too. Now people searching get a bunch of blogs and random news articles in their place, so I don't see how this benefits anyone.

I also notice "page speed performance" was updated on the 25th when this happened, and I was given notice for "poor performance". I wonder that kicked something in, if G checked page speed for these sites and there was a server problem, and I got hit for that?

Sorry to read that, sounds suspicious, specially linked to a G+ account. I understand that's how G wants to address diff issues on authorship, well, G tries to do a lot of things and is not actually doing too well on many.

Anyway working on speed (as littlecbpnd) says and cleaning backlinks sounds like a good start, all purpose start. Or it is just the collateral damage of an algo update.

sorry to hear that, same #*$! happened to 2 of my sites. Luckily i have bunch of them spread-ed across different webmasters/adsense accounts so i dont really mind to loose few of them to learn something else and valuable.

so, what exactly happened to me? Well, very same #*$!. Almost all keywords got hit and went from 1-5 to 25-30. Traffic (one site) from 6k to 800 unique (still decreasing), adsense for that site from XX to X EU. Last 3-4 days were horrible, yet again i don't give a *** as still got many webs and still make killing.

Issue: Still speculating (as you do), yet most likely it was hit due to outbound links (i used cracked WP theme on my sites and some backdoors were left on themes i use, so some smart ass 2.5 month ago left a bunch of sex related outbound links), made them visible only for robots (google bots).

I did receive a message to my webmasters account saying exact thing "i was hacked and my content was cloaked". so this might be an issue to me. I cleaned everything up and waiting to get my rankings back, if not i just throw websites in the trash and will keep working on another webs.

I advice you to inspect all of your outbound links (there are bunch of tools both paid and free to do so)

good luck pal towards recovery.

Thanks for the input.

@ Romeo... I agree, an outbound link/hack problem could be an issue.

"Your earnings were 73% below our forecast"

Gee, no #*$!in #*$!. Whose fault is that?

It sounds like you were sandboxed. I use to see it all the time when I was a consultant. New site would do well for a few months and then suddenly lose traffic from Google.

It is one of those cannot confirm or deny things with Google. My theory is that it is done to discourage get-rich-quick types.

Theory goes that Google wants you to prove the value of your site. They give you a little so you can get started, but after that, you have to prove yourself before you can rank well. Again, all theory and anecdotes.

One of my sites was penalised by Google and ever since, my adsense has dropped by 70%-80% even though traffic has dropped by only half. Is Google keeping more money from penalised sites?

Also some of my other sites are now also impacted negatively on Google. Is this because all the sites are under the same google account?

The same thing has happened to me for the past 2 months. No wonder why my earnings have dropped dramatically.

Time to work and my sites again and do some adjustments for the next 4 months.

@ hannamyluv...

That's really interesting. Is that something a real person would manually review?

Let me guess: even if you "prove" yourself, your sites will never rank well again.

Let me guess: even if you "prove" yourself, your sites will never rank well again.

So is this a thread about earnings or about rankings? Just curious.

Let me guess: even if you "prove" yourself, your sites will never rank well again.

Oh goodness, no. What would be the point in that?

Frankly, I tell anyone who starts out new to expect AT LEAST 18 months before the search engines even pay attention to you (of course, I am sure there are all sorts of people who could counter me on this and likely their sites only have a lifespan of about 18 months). The search engines were done with the churn and burn sites a long, long time ago. They wanted to make sure that you had some skin in the game, so to speak.

All pages go through a kind of sandbox really. When I publish a new page, I don't expect it to do anything for at least 12 months, and statistically, they don't really hit full stride until after 3 years.

There are millions of sites out there who have been working for years to get traffic. So why should yours be suddenly blessed just because you got a domain name and a hosting account?

You are truly a little cub in the internet world. The sandbox is just G's way of telling you that your sites have a little growing up to do.

@ hannamyluv

Fair enough. At least my sites are all linked together and continue to grow with content and improve. Nowhere to go but up right now.