Rory Hansen

On Halloween, I wrote that my SERP’s (Search Engine Ranking Positions) were totally off-the-wall, with keywords that I was once ranked #2 and #3 and #4 for showing no ranking at all. My niche website had essentially disappeared from Google’s radar for these high-traffic keywords, resulting in a > 75% drop in traffic. Forums like SitePoint and DigitalPoint and WebmasterWorld were filling with posts of weary webmasters, concerned about their keyword positions changing for the worse.

Thankfully, SERP’s seem to be returning to where they were pre-Halloween, as in the last 24 hours I’ve started to regain my keyword positions. (At least for some keywords.) I expect the Google Dance to go on for another 24 hours or so, after which time things should be back to normal.

I’ll be doing a more complete write-up of this after work today, but from the reading I’ve been doing, it seems to have been a Google error, where they accidentally reverted to old indexing data.