9 Reasons Why Your Google Rankings May Tank

[branica]

Here is a great post by Aaron and I have seen this on a few sites. Here is a snippet - I would recommend reading the entire post though:

Question: I have a client that frequently ranks at the top of the search results then sharply drops. His website's Google rankings keep bouncing back and forth. Why do they fluctuate so much?

Answer: Via using spammy links, leveraging the internal link structure of a high authority site, or cross site scripting exploits just about anyone can rank for a day, but it is harder to stay there day in and day out until you build massive domain authority.


Google and other major search engines have many filters, editors, algorithms, and barriers which are used to prevent spamming or minimize the profitability of overt spam. I believe that Google has moved away from banning sites as much and instead moved to using filters more, because that makes it harder to know when / why / where something went wrong. Was your host down, did you screw up your robots.txt file or is that a penalty? The more they can obfuscate their algorithms the harder it is to do SEO and the more people will opt into Google's webmaster tools authentication system.

Read the rest of the post here.

I think Google does a really good job of hiding penalties by using filters as Aaron mentions. Webmasterworld has long standing threads around the "-30" and the "'-950" filter. And as long as Google is the top dog - people will tend to over-rotate to what Google employees say or what others are stating their latest theories on why sites go up or down. I personally think the days of the "easy" affiliate money is much harder now in large scales. Is it still being done? - for sure but it gets harder and harder to do. Money still can be made but it takes more time and more energy - heck like a real business .