Checking my stats, I discovered a major falloff in the last week or so in the percentage of people reaching this site through google. So I tried some google searches, and we seem to have almost vanished. This site used to appear, for example, on the front page for searches on “Uzbekistan” and the second for “Jack Straw”. It is now not on the first twenty or so pages. We only hit the front page on a very specific search, like “Craig Murray” or “Murder in Samarkand”. Broadly the same thing is true on Yahoo.
Yet a random check shows links to this site from other sites still working, and Technorati’s “Authority” ranking continues to mount, now to 499. This search engine drop does seem to have been caused by a sudden event, not a gradual decline. Can anybody offer an explanation?