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In case you aren’t aware, there is a new algorithm in town.
It seems some sites have been removed from the listings for the more commercial phrases. This means that a phrase that was generating a lot of your best traffic has now disappeared. Needless to say, not a few people are very upset by this.
We’ve been researching in greater detail what is going on at Google.
There are three possibilities of what is going on.
Here they are:
1. There is a temporary bug in the listings at Google. If this is the case, things should clear up in the next month or so.
2. Phrases that have a great deal of Google AdWords advertisements are being penalized in the main “free” listings. In this theory, people believe that Google might be testing how to get more people to click on the Google AdWords listings by not having great natural listings.
This could be a very possible scenario. In our testing there are clearly a lot of AdWords listings for the phrases we researched.
3. Their new algorithm is factoring out over-optimized pages from their listings. In this theory, if a site uses an exact phrase in all of the possible places a person would normally use for optimization, the site gets penalized.
Those are the major possibilities of what has happened to your site.
My suggestion is to not change anything from an optimization standpoint. If it turns out to be a bug, and things are fixed soon, you don’t want to change anything. If it’s not a bug, we’ll know in a month or two.
In the meantime, my recommendation is to start bidding in Google AdWords for your big phrases. That way you’ll still be in the listings as all of this gets sorted out.