Today I came into work and straight away started to run all my usual reports, went to make a cup of tea, and when I came back to my desk I almost fell off my chair.

We dropped 20 places!

We had dropped position on our second highest keyword by 20 places (on Google.com.au for Australian sites only)! Our drop was from number 1 (which we have held for over a year) to position 20. At first I thought "Oh no, what did we do wrong?", but then I noticed other keywords had very little change.

Start the research 

I started doing some research into the keyword and noticed that we were not the only one on this keyword to drop so many places; in fact, we had the smallest drop compared to other competitors, who dropped 30-40 places.

Who replaced us? 

I reviewed who was placed in the top 19, and not one of our competitors was in the top 20. Every single site in the top 19 were "non-profit" sites or information-based sites with no sales funnels. Out of the top 5 results, 4 of the sites are .gov.au. Check it out for yourself.

Is this a new algorithm test or a hiccup?

In conclusion, the only thing that I can see is that Google has changed the way it ranks sites for "private health insurance." It has clearly ranked sites that are informational more then "sales" orientated. Is this a sign of things to come? Should all SEOs be worried? Could this change be a push from Google to increase revenue via Adwords?