Google Ranking system Goes Wild!

I get totally different results when I am logged into my gmail account.

My site showed #2 for all searches regardless of whether or not I was logged in to my google account.

I have 10+ sites of different topics. Most of them have appeared on page one for their respective key words. On April 1, ALL of them dropped to page 4-5. I got the feeling they are banned, but I don't understand why. No bought links, no tricks. The sites have been up for 1-3 years, inmproving their search results month by month. On the most popular site, the search results have been like a ping pong cirkus the last month. Always different results, just a big tornado among the search results.

I have removed all links between my sites, removed some of the affiliate links, rewritten descriptions... Nothing helps.
Anyone who has experienced the same and got back in position?


Whatever the SERP volatility is, it's been showing us very odd behavior -- unlikely pages fly into the top spots for a bit and then vanish. By the way, the MySpace page I mentioned seeing at #4 yesterday is ranking at #53 today.

This brings up a good point - we should all make sure that we are not logged in to a Google account when we check the SERPs. If we are logged in, then we see personalized results that are tailored to our total behavior when we are logged in - what we click on in the past, post specifically. So the logged in results are not so useful for understanding any changes in the ranking algo.

I've seen horrifying drops in one of my sites. 50% loss of traffic since February 15th or so, when this all started going down. This past week I'm looking at the worst traffic ever.

And yet: I'm still ranking very competitively for most of my key phrases, I haven't done anything under the table, adding new content every day, lots of nice links coming ing (.edu, .gov, etc.). Some of the really awful sites that weren't much of a competition to me on my most competitive phrases are now ranking above me - and they are really, really awful. Like embarrassing awful.

So I don't know what's going on, I've read this entire thread (18 pages worth, oy vey), and I guess the consensus is to just sit it out and wait? Because honestly, I think I've got the worst case scenario over here for a site that has been number one for extremely competitive phrases for almost five years, and traffic has decided to take an extended vacation.

I'm giving up with Google. The more I do, the worse things get for me. Not true with Yahoo or Bing though. My rankings there are directly proportional to my efforts, and are always measurable


*Quote:webmasterworld discussion board @www.webmasterworld.com/google/3632422-3-30.htm