As always, when Google performs one of their periodic updates, people (aka webmasters) see some pretty scary things happen. A couple of sites that I actively monitor and tweak ever so slightly, fell off the map. These are not sites that receive thousands of visitors a day, well actually that is not true…one was this very site. This blog as well as another site that is WordPress based fell off of the map a few weeks ago. This site receives anywhere from 3,500 to 5,000 unique visitors a day. I know that may be hard for some of you to fathom, but it is true. A few weeks ago, about a week or so after the toolbar update, this thing fell out of the Google index. While it was a bit out of the ordinary, I didn’t freak out too much as I had seen things like this happen before. Then I noticed that another site, one used for my day job, went MIA as well. It actually had a pretty big impact as we receive 5 or so email leads and probably 5 to 10 phone calls a day from it. Well, they both are back to normal as of yesterday with regards to their positioning in the G SERPs before the update started.

One interetsing thing to note is that one of my newer sites just saw a number of smaller terms “pop” this morning/yesterday. So, it will be interesting to see if they hold there or if there is still some metering going on at the G-plex.

tags: google, index, serps, toolbar, update