Can inactivity cause ranking drop
Hi all,
I have been doing quite well for my search term "wedding invitations" in Google.com.au for quite a few years now. However, I recently left my website (in signature) without updates for 5 weeks over December and a bit of January. I did continue to process orders and answer emails, but did no actual page updates and information was not added to the site during this time. I continually checked my rankings though December and all was going well (I was ranking #4 for this term) until the first week of January. From 3 January I slipped to the second page to #11, the first time in many years we have disappeared from page 1. Initially I thought it was temporary, but now I'm still sitting there and google has done 2 cache updates of my site since then. I have also been doing my usual homepage updates when adding new products to our catalogue since 7 January, so there is actuivity again.
O.K. my question is, can not adding or changing a website for 5 weeks cause a drop in ranking so drastic? If so, has anyone had any experience like this and did your ranking get back or close to where it was before (and how long did it take to re-appear).
Thanks in advance.
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