Earlier this year I decided to have a look at the SEO of our website. We noticed almost immediately that we dropped significantly in the SERPs for the keyword 'probiotics' (plural) on the 12th November. For the singular version 'probiotic' we did not shift at all.At the moment we think there are a few reasons for this. Firstly, a UK TV programme called 'The Food Hospital' talked extensively about our industry on the 8th of November. On that day we noticed a 5 fold increase in the search term 'probiotics'. Traffic spiked for about 4 days and we had lots of sales. Across the board all our statistics improved for that time, bounce rate on the day was down to 16%, conversion rate went to roughly 30%. We thought that was a fantastic result.Two days after the TV show, we dropped in the SERPs from 4th down to 7th. There was also initially a spike where we were 16th.In addition to this increase in traffic, we had recently switched to a CDN / proxy based in the US. We're a UK registered company and we have UK servers, but the name-servers are now in the US. Would that negatively impact our position in the SERPs?So really what we'd like to know is this : does Google's algorithm take into account the type of information a user is looking for, and could that have affected us? Would using a US based proxy affect us, and could this somehow be related to Panda?It also occurred to us that maybe the other sites did fantastically better than us. Although our bounce rate dropped, would a larger drop (say 90% to 10%) be more favourable in Google's eyes?Any advice on where to look next would be greatly appreciated.
Significant drop in SERPs on 12th November 2011
seo;google search;cdn;serps;google panda algorithm