yes, our main web site, SingaporeWebHosting.com, dropped ranking in Google.

google “Singapore web hosting”, at this moment 11:40pm Mar 25th 2005, our site is No. 6, 5 minutes ago, it was at No. 4. It may be No. 12 one hour later.

most importantly, it had been at No. 1 for almost all related keywords, (Singapore web hosting, Singapore web design, Singapore email hosting , etc.) for more than 1 year. then suddenly from Feb 4th 2005, it dropped to nowhere.

it was hit really hard by latest Google update (alegra), like many other web sites.

we did nothing after Alegra, because I believe we did nothing wrong from beginning. we do not use any blackhat technique.

then slowly ranking has been getting back. first, on 5th page 2 weeks after alegra, then 3rd page, 2nd page, now back to 1st page. it’s still jumping up and down.

we didn’t do anything in order to recover.

there might be a few reasons from what i can see. hope it can be helpful to those who are hit. purely my guess, no evidence. 🙂 so don’t blame me if it’s far from truth.

1)google is testing something and messed it up. that’s why our ranking is back while we did nothing. currently i can see two sets of data, in one set, our site is No.4, in the other, it’s No. 6. these two sets have diferent amount of search results. look like google is merging these two slowly. they may be testing many other things as well.

2)anyone can have only one site listed on 1st page under same keywords. the No.1 site for “Sinagpore web hosting”, and many other keywords, is also ours (1stSingaporeWebHosting.com). these two sites just cannot rank well at the same time.

3)age might be a reason. 1stSingaporeWebHosting.com is half year older than SingaporeWebHosting.com. both sites are designed and optimized by the same people using the same techniques, the only difference is age.

whatever the reason is, we’re not going to do anything. the fact that our newer site is getting back to top reveals that solid search engine optimization work still rules. ranking might suffer due to many many reasons, but if you believe you’ve done the work, your site deserves the top spot, then leave it, it will be back.