A thread at WebmasterWorld named A real Google conundrum: Established site losing all its Google traffic, asks the question, what should one do when a site that has been ranking well for years, all of a sudden drops in the rankings.
In fact, this site, experienced that back towards the end of September. The Google traffic basically dropped off to a small fraction of what it was in the past. What did I do? Well, nothing - I did nothing at all. And sure enough, traffic came back in less then a month (I believe). I wasn't going to start changing a site that ranked very well in the past. But what if my income depended on income from this site? What if it was how I put food on the table everyday? Would I have reacted? Very hard to say.
All I can say is that many have suggested the same advice in the WebmasterWorld thread. Brett Tabke, the founder of WebmasterWorld, suggested to do "NOTHING". He said, "The worst thing you could do, would be to go make a bunch of changes. Just let the algo work itself out." A senior member said that he "made the mistake of making many changes after taking the hit, many months later no where to be found." Other's suggested that during the down period, it is a good time to do some double checking of the basics. Examples they offered include; "move a bunch of sites to dedicated IPs, checked/tested that all sites had a 301 from domain.com to www.domain.com, checked reverse DNS, and added a timestamp to the pages."
But, if you feel you have not made any drastic changes to your site to warrant the decrease in rankings and referral traffic from a specific engine, then do not do anything drastic now.
