The drop we experienced yesterday in our search result position is nothing short of disasterous for us. Our online shop of 8 years standing serving thousands of loyal customers, enjoyed first page position in search engine results for it's main key word for years. Now it has dropped back to page three! For no apparent reason! Is Google getting fat and bored? So they have to play with people's lives?

It must be wonderful to tweak around with a system that's working, unwittingly screw it up and go home to sleep soundly, knowing you don't have to account to anyone, or answer emails or deal with the wave of rage, worry and sleepless nights they have caused for tens of thousands of business people, already struggling with soaring prices and deep recession. People with genuinly good websites providing a worthwhile and appreciated service who now have to step aside for countless crappy link farms, pr scams, "Ads from Google" websites, spam and useless directories.

Our website receives nothing but praise for clarity, great design, ease of navigation, and a huge choice. But Google seem to think that's not enough!

Here are some examples of what is now in front of us:

1. jewellery.shop.ebay.com.au - an Australian ebay catagory list!
2. News Results for jewellery with 3 news items listed
3. Jewelinfo4u.com - I cannot make this site out, it doesn't seem to be a shop, the links have errors and my antivirus software stopped a trojan. Very useful!!
4. Shopping results for jewellery:
Jewels and Jewellery from $17 - 31 stores. Click this link and google presents a list. At the top Amazon - click Amazon and it goes to a book about jewellery. Every link on this page goes to the same paperback!
Same thing for Indian jewellery! A book!
Same thing for Victorian Jewellery! A book! Is this Google spam?

5. amazon.com - This link goes to an audio dvd called "jewellery".
6. Long established large High Street chain bricks and mortar jewellery shops for whom the internet is secondary.

Lives depend on our business and God knows the economy makes it hard enough. It's more and more difficult to keep up a flow of orders since this recession began. Some days have been dire, but we've managed to hold fast, keeping up with email marketing to our customers and keeping the website bright and active with regular additions and changes. We have nearly 2,000 products now. But from the moment Google dumped us onto the third page orders almost totally dried up. It was like a kick in the gut!

We've done everything we can to stay within the guidelines for optimum search engine placement, careful not "break the rules". But Google have all but trashed us. The joke is they probably haven't even looked at our website and they probably don't care. They've got big and fat and lazy and forgotten how it is on the way up!