Have I done something wrong?

[Michael Martinez]

OPC, it's anyone's guess whether links from a particular resource like Facebook may be carrying more (or less) value. I can easily imagine statistical models that show how such sites might see a rise and fall in conveyed value without the search engines doing anything.

Google, on the other hand, claims to tweak its algorithms between 10 and 20 times a week. They don't say what these tweaks do.

In addition to their tweaks, Google's Web spam team is constantly updating the index by imposing and lifting penalties. Sometimes they block whole sites from passing value through links. Sometimes they block only parts of sites from passing value through links. These penalty/forgiveness actions may have significant impact on search results in some verticals.

I generally conclude that Google has made a significant algorithmic change after seeing many people make similar comments or complaints in a lot of forums and blogs. I look for broad patterns that extend beyond verticals.

And I look at the inventory of sites I manage, as they cut across several verticals. I have seen some odd behavior over the past few days myself.

While it's still too early for anyone to be sure of what is going on, things do seem to indicate a rollback of some sort occurred. Usually you only need to wait 1-2 weeks for Google's search results to get back on track after a rollback. I've seen Google delay normal operation by as much as 3 weeks one time (and on that occasion they made a formal statement about what happened).

I would not worry for now. Even if a site has incurred a penalty, fixing the problem during a rollback won't necessarily speed up reinclusion. Some minor penalties are now handled automatically, meaning if you fix the problem the search engine just removes the penalty the next time it crawls and reindexes your site.

And I should note that I have always advised people NOT to try to analyze the algorithm during any sort of update process. That is the worst possible time to try to figure out what works and what needs to be done.

This is a good time to just keep producing new content. Usually, new content gets into the index during these stallout periods faster than old content is recrawled/reindexed/recached.