My sitewas doing pretty well on google and msn for my targeted keywords and over night , its ranking has gone really bad on both msn and google.

i have only made a tiny change in the meta tags, title, and on the page. nothing major. just moved words around.

what could be the cause? is it normal for a site to go through that after making such changes?

Make sure your meta and title match the content on your site. A big no no would be for example:
meta: hosting, webhosting, servers, linux clusters
title: Linux hosting on huge clusters
And the content be about free message boards.
It doesnt match and the crawlers dont like that.
This from what I have read on other SEO forums.
Hope this helps ;)

ok this is the change i made

my title was, "Arcade games forum - free flash games"

most of my visitors are intrested in playing games and not the forum.

so I changed it to "arcade games online - free flash games - gaming forum"

same with meta discription

it used to be arcade games forum is ---- what ever, play over 200 flash games etc


so I change that to

Play over 200 flash games and so on, and then the forum bit at the end of the discription

So i haven't really changed anything just rearanged it.

ok i'm back on msn, but still not on google, do u think it will just take some time?

it seems that my index page is not in googles index any more. but the rest of my site is.

do you think they are updating the index dew to the changes i made?

your index page is on Google http://www.google.com.au/search?q=%22%2Bwww.arcadegamesforum.%2Bcom/%22&hl=en&lr=&filter=0

however i had to type it in and then click 'contain the term' and look around to find it..

do you do alot of reciprocal linking??

if so, are you getting links from similar related websites or just anywhere??

Yeah i have a lot of reporicale links. most of them are site wide from other games and entertainment sites.

i don't do any exchange with unrelated site. 2 days ago my site was ranked very well. i was 4th or 5th for "free arcade" I think 9th for "free arcade games" and well ranked for similar gaming terms.

I'm not even number 1 for my basic site name "arcade games forum"

the only thing i changed was the page title , descrition and keywords, to try and optomise the keywords more lol

i think it back fired.

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.arcadegamesforum.com&meta= if you look at this link, my homepage doesn't seem to be there

highly unlikely a title change would have such a significant affect over night.

now this is only an educated guess by me, but some speculation is around that google is implementing some sort of 'dampening' effect on incoming links to websites, in particular from 'bad neighborhoods'.

now what i would suggest you do is go and have a look at the websites linking to you.. and if there using some sort of automated link management tool or program to manage there links, ask them to remove your link.

if there are alot of links that are not similar to their industry / site eg: "viagra" type links on there page, also ask them to remove your link.

have a look at what sites you are linking to from yours also.
make sure there not upto anything google wouldn't like.

i have seen quite a few sites recently like yours that have just dissapeared and i'm not 100% sure, but i think google has added some sort of link defining technique to their algorithm which could be catching sites that are linked too / linked from that are seen as 'bad neighborhoods.'

or you could just wait and see what happens, as google has/is quite buggy :)

I guess I have to wait and see, I was doing fine before google started sending the traffic, guess i can live without it.

But its a pi$$ take tho, ok its understandable about out going link. but what the hell can webmasters do if a porn site or a viagra sites starts linking to you.

you are correct, if they have implemented some sort of link penalty, i'm sure there algorithm would be alot more complicated than 'hey lets penalize this site because it's got a few links from viagra type sites'.

i'm sure they probably monitor certain linking patterns and so forth.

i would just be cautious where i'm getting links from and who i am linking too. :)

or it could be google just being google (quite buggy) so patience could be the key..

I guess you need to wait for about 1 month to see your index page on old positions in google. We had such situation 3 times already and in all cases the page appeared on old positions after about 1 month.

yeah i guess its a matter of time once again, the domain is only 4 months old and it had only been 2 weeks since the good ranking. well i guess i'll re optomise the title again . and then forget about it.

i do link exchanges for traffic anyway.