Google is known for its ‘dance’ when it shuffles results about once a month. This time something screwy is happening. If you haven’t checked your rankings on Google lately, check again. Terms I was at our near the top for are now not showing in the first three pages. What is showing up are pages which aren’t that valuable to the user.
I’m surprised this hasn’t been something I’d hear elsewhere. Everyone watches Google, don’t they? My favorite SEO site, I Help You has a good thread on this problem, but this is about all I could quickly find. General opinion seems to be to wait and see…this must be some kind of mistake.
Why is a more interesting question. My wild guess is that Google is purposefully deflating their balloon a little. A lot of speculation has gone into how much Google can dominate the internet and what the ramifications would be. This is the power of an organization that is not publicly owned. I’ve said it for two years now…Google’s strength lies in being a private company that can do what it wants, as opposed to ‘maximizing revenue’.
UPDATE (11/25): My new buddy Glen pointed me to an post at ‘slash dot’ which pointed at this interesting article about the change at Google. Now I know more, but it seems no one has decided what, if anything, to do about it.