It might just be me, but does anybody else think there has been a Google role back earlier this month? (October – November 2009)

I think it was around the end of October (2009) that I first started noticing a dramatic change in the rankings for a site I had recently launched. I was experiencing the usual gradual climb in rankings that a new domain experiences, meanwhile Google Caffeine was buzzing all over the internet and webmasters were testing out their sites in Google’s sandbox (www2.sandbox.google.com).

Suddenly one day, while tracking my sites progress I noticed a sudden drop in rankings that sent my website tumbling from the second page to the ninth page for one of my keywords, as well as experiencing similar but slightly less severe trends for the vast majority of my keywords.  In all honesty it felt very much like the clock had been turned back and my rankings had been returned to their previous positions a month or so earlier.

As I understand it at the time Google may have been testing out some of the Caffeine updates in the live search. Is it possible that they may have rolled back results to undo an unwanted update they were testing?

I would be very happy to hear from anyone else who experienced anything similar, or has any opinions on this.

Jon
SEO Birmingham