My site crashed in Rankings from a day ago?!?!

Yesterday when I made the search for "poison vodka" on Google, my page was #1 on page #1:
Poison Vodka in Russia or Poison in the Press? - Russophile.com - Russia

Today the same search puts me half way down on page #12 plus it links to the home page: Russophile.com and not to the article on poison vodka.

I did several other searches on some of my top content and the only good results are the links like this search for Russian transportation: russian transportation - Google Search It brings up the old URL which is 301'ed rather than the new link. This search pulls up: http://www.russophile.com/stories/trans.htm rather than the new vbSEO vBulliten link: The Two Cultures of Russian Public Transportation - Russophile.com - Russia

Nothing is showing up reasonable any more in searches -- even for exact article titles -- unless I have the page 301'ed from its old location. The 301 of course only applies to old articles and not the new one like the poison vodka article.

Do I have any chance of those vBulletin links getting indexed again? What could have caused this crash and is there any way to fix it?

I expect that it will likely correct itself. Your forum is new. Stick with it.

Thanks for the encouragement. It was just shocking to see the huge traffic and search engine ranking drop from yesterday.

Do you think that it could be caused by the RSS feeds I added to my site: Other Russia Blogs - Russophile.com - Russia

It is pulling in so many feeds related to Russia so fast, it may just look like I am copying all the content from other places, but it is just that one forum section that is like that. Should I exclude that forum section from being crawled in robots.txt?

Thanks

When did you put that in place?

I have been slowly adding interesting RSS feeds for several days now and the first one started exactly 03-23-2007 01:18 AM. I found it interesting to have all my favorite blogs and news sites related to my topic pulled into one location, so I thought other people might like it too. I suppose that I do not have enough history built up to know for certain if this caused the decline.

I am only using the description part of the RSS feed and not the full content, so I can link back to the original person's blog or the original news feed. (My intent is not to steal content but to aggregate my topic of interest.) It sure makes for a great number of forum posts with a small amount of content with no replies.

Crazy, I just hit the link again out of curiosity and I am back at the top

Well - I'm glad to hear that. Remember - Google (especially) is known to fluctuate alot. Sometimes it's just a matter of which data center you're hitting.

Originally Posted by Joe Ward

Well - I'm glad to hear that. Remember - Google (especially) is known to fluctuate alot. Sometimes it's just a matter of which data center you're hitting.

Thanks I guess that I just never paid enough attention. OK -- relax -- deep breaths. I need to just quit obsessing about the search rank and work on better content and the results will come.

Even funnier, this page is now 5th in the world for that search phrase.