From about the June 6th on, many of my most popular pages have been dropped from at least the first few pages of results.

Most were top serps for years.

Does Google offer a tool that would cache results, a history for searchable terms?

How can I find out what happened?

Are they going through a marathon dance?

There has been a recent update to the algorithm and have heard a lot of people saying they are having the same problem.

Do you update your content often? Have you gotten new links regularly?

Seems Google is sweeping some of the older sites that have not had recent links - makes it look like they are not as active or did the linking back in the day and may have been bought etc.

They figure if new people are not giving you love then there may be a reason - the site is no longer as good as it used to be.

Even though it gets more that 22,000 uniques a day?

Content has not been updated since Fall 07' and many links are of a nice vintage!

- And I thought age of a site was something to be sought after.

Bumped off by newer sites with lower content value. This is discouraging.

go through this post and see if you are having the same problems
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3668739.htm

Yes, commonalities I see are:
(pages are not even in top 100 now - this is disaster)

- entire site has only 2 outbound links
- no alt image tags -- all I see on results have these.
- copyright notice date is old on page btm (my own observation) - though doubt Google be seeing this as 'old' since other tops pages are same way

I would have the copyright date updated definitely... and maybe give a nod to a couple more authority sites... would always add some alt tags... different descriptions.... get some new links

different descriptionsMeta, right?

Have even thought about a Yahoo directory listing - but by the way things are going, they may count that as 'paid' link here shortly.

Actually, discontinued a Yahoo listing with another site about 9 mo.s back and it made absolutely no difference whatsoever.

This shakeup gives less relevant results from what I see.
Some sites with much higher content count are given preference.

For results that browsers want a 'quick reference' for, much is buried in irrelevant lengthy text, on and on down the page.

Makes no sense, according to many search terms.

- With emphasis on alt tags, it almost looks like G. may be gearing to present traditional sites for mobile viewing. Ex: can't fit the image on a smaller screen, so the alt is displayed.

One other thing:

To keep the stats cleaner, I've still listed the css on individual pages - and not on stylesheet. Most of course, don't do this now.

Could this have something to do with it? I guess it could make pages less unique, including code.

I would clean the css... building some links anf add new content pages

I guess I am just not surprised at this at all...

I have seen Amazon do this for years.... They take on a few mom and pop stores that are willing to sell at the absolute lowest cost they can survive on to get the sales. Then, Amazon (presumably) sees this data from all sellers, and using this data, contacts the manufacturer directly offering to sell their item. They have great past data to project and the manufacturer cuts them a deal. Now that Amazon is a competitor, who do you think is going to get the exposure? They can cherry pick one item per company per month and none are the wiser. Unless, of course, your cherry was picked.

I don't see this as much different than Goog offering up 2 top pages. One that supplies adsense and one that is an advertiser. It only benefits them to drive the advertiser down in the serps to force them to pay more often and it benefits them to drive the adsense content to the top, which they also benefit from.

Regardless of whether or not we may think the results are suffering.. maybe the consumer is just being taught that the more relevant results are the paid listings and they should try those more often to get their desired result.

Just a thought...

I've seen a .gov with a graybar'ed toolbar PR hit top 3 for a 2 word search term.

It's been disappearing and reappearing as Google tweeks the parameters of their new algo. They're still in the middle of making quality changes IMO.

I'm not impressed. I've seen some doorway pages and made for adsense sites in top 10 results as of lately.

I've seen pages some massively overused keyphrases - arranged almost every possible way in a list and in it the same plurals following singular versions. And actual keyphrase lists on the page, which should be unheard of.

Seems anytime prior those pages/sites wouldn't have had a chance.

That's my exhalted competition.

Question: does it really matter to have lines on the page recording updates like "Last update on 6.17.08" ?

I have a site with a #1 ranking that was dropped entirely from Google a few days ago. I used the same optimization process that I've used for the past 3 years, and none of my other #1 ranked sites were affected at all.

The sites that are now showing up in top rankings are extremely non-relevant. If this is due to some new algorithm then I'm in big trouble, because up until now I've had a lot of success by not deviating from what is working!

Yes, I've got one page that climbs to #3 for a couple of days, then falls to page 4, them back to #5 briefly then right back to page 4. Extremely frustrating because I feel helpless to do anything. No telling what is causing it.

One other thing I have noticed is that I will get different results when I search from the toolbar than what I get from the Google web page search box. AND, if I run a search for something like "rayban sunglasses" and then click on the "Do you mean ray ban sunglasses" (where ray ban is two words), the results that come up from that result page will also be different from what I get if I type the query into the Google page.

And, no, I'm not logged into Google when I do this.

I've been experiencing this too.

Click one moment and results are different rankings than the next click and the next, then maybe it will hold for a little while.

Some of the pages that stuck with higher rankings, that is