My site is dropping for no apparent reason!

One of my sites have been doing great and have gotten the top positions but just few days ago it started dropping for no apparent reason. I mostly focus on white hat seo and have done only a bit of blog posting and always trying to keep building links naturally, bookmarking, video submission, direcotry submission etc.

All of my content is 100% unique, I have no clue whats happening, could the internal linking be the problem as I'm using an internal linking plugin which automatically creates links to my main page but ofcoarse I do manually link to other pages as well, please shine some light on my problem, thank you much in advance.

You did some Onsite SEO?

I have seen the same on my site. Its also mainly white hat. Just as you I used SEO smartlinks to intern link.. I have removed the links now and are hoping to get ok SE traffic back.

Clearly its due to Google dance.
there are many posts in BHW recently created about this problem. So don't be tensed and wait for some more days to see the result.

Well, my site have been hit for over a month. Almost all traffic from Google stopped suddenly, and it have Been low traffic since.

A site of mine dropped recently but... I was bad, and google noticed ; (

I don't think its google dance, because when my other sites dance they drop to like 10ths or even further pages, this just slowly dropping down.. been doin this for 2 yeas never saw anything like that.

Maybe the links that you have built have been deindexed? Keep in mind that Google deindexed a lot of blog networks.

I read somewhere that seo smartlinks is not good once your site starts getting bigger because the internal links will be very dynamic and keep changing as you add more posts. They mentioned that sometimes google will interpret internal links being changed as link manipulation. (When the internal links keep changing but the information around the link is not updated)

I'm not sure how true this is, but I'm no longer using seo smart links on any of my newer sites. And yes, all my sites using seo smart links have plummeted when they hits around 100-150 pages. It might just be coincidence though, I'm not sure.

I used to love google dance because I knew it meant my site was going to come back stronger, but now whenever a site drops, I get very worried and question if I did anything wrong. I have many sites that have dropped and never come back even with consistent building for over a year (I've finally found the courage to stop working on those so I can focus on new projects).

A lesson I learned is sometimes whitehat isn't good enough. Your site can be 100% whitehat, but if it doesn't give the users what they want, there's a chance you will drop off the radar eventually or once google has collected enough metrics on your site. (High bounce rate / users clicking block because their annoyed they didnt find what they were looking for etc.)

My old sites had average time on site 4 minutes + fairly clean/consistent link profile (they all still got penalized by google). My new sites have average time on site 10-15 min but their still quite new and their ranking is very consistent.

What is your current bounce rate/time on site? 100% unique content usually doesn't mean as much anymore from what I've seen, it has to be 100% unique and high quality for long term ranking. 100% unique seems to get rankings short term but drop off after google gets a bit of stats on the user interaction with it. Of course it depends on the niche and the competition from what I've noticed...

I would recommend finding the pages with the highest bounce/lowest time on site and either fixing the content to answer the users query, or noindex/******** those pages.

I remember reading a year or so ago that when you dip in the SERP's due to the Google dance, increase your backlink building efforts. When you come out of the "dance" it is likely you will slingshot higher than before the interruption. Never tried it but I remembered that when I read your post. If you're doing mostly white hat it might be time to do some gray hat or double up on the white stuff.

Google has been making a lot of tweaks to their algorithm. Your site may just have gotten caught up in that. I've noticed sites that we're ranking strong dropped for no apparent reason. The likely culprit is Google just re-weighting your backlinks causing your site to bounce around.

A lot of SERPs are crazy at the moment due to the new Google updates etc.. Just keep building your content/links. See were things are in a few weeks time. Then take action from there if you're still not seeing any movement. Hope you can recover.

Just focus mostly on WhiteHat stuff when your website goes down to avoid going down it in the future

I agree with others, its more likely to be dance.