If you are a Google watcher in even the slightest sense of the word you will have seen the absolute up-roar going on at present over the changes in its search result policy. This change affects many sites and is one of the things Google is trying to do to cope with various poison tactics that is being employed by dodgy webmasters.
Lots of theories have seen the light, a good write up can be found here
On Friday, 21st November, Google decided to tighten the "filter". All hell broke loose as tens of thousands of sites disappeared from positions they had held (in some cases) for years. We noticed some of our client sites plummeting for their major key phrase from being #1 to total invisibility. Yet this was only in highly competitive areas, not for their secondary phrases. These sites were, in most cases, not highly optimized, had not sought reciprocal links but had achieved their rankings through being on the web for 4 or 5 years. The bad news was that their company name and domain included the key phrase, sites (including directories) linking to those sites included the key phrase in their links and Google interpreted this as over-optimization and down they plunged. In many areas all the top 20 ranking sites disappeared, including industry leaders, to be replaced by educational sites, news review sites, government sites, major shopping portals or directories. Something major had happened - but what?
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