Ranked on Page 1, now between page 40-50... Please help!

[Prime85]

My site, http://goo.gl/h0igI was ranking on page one for many of our biggest keywords.  All of a sudden, we completely fell off.  I believe I'm down somewhere between page 40-50.  I have no warning or error messages in webmaster tools.

Can anyone please help me identify what the problem is?  This is completely unexpected and I don't know how to fix it...

Thanks in advance

[SarahGoliger]

I still see you on Page 1 of Google for many of the keywords that are in your meta-keywords tag for your homepage. Can you please be more specific about what penalty you think you are seeing?

Your domain authority and mozRank are much lower than the other websites that are on the first page for some of these keywords, and while you have many links in OSE, they are from a relatively narrow diversity of websites, where the other sites listed highly have similar numbers of links but from a very diverse list of domains. How are you working on your linkbuilding? What methods are you trying?

Because you have a partial match between your domain name and many of the keywords you've listed in that tag, it could also be partially due to Google's continuing reduction in the value of keyword-matching in domain names. Matt Cutts has said on a few occasions that they are working on turning down the influence of exact-match keywords in domains, and I would not be surprised if this was at least partially related to their changes around this. I have no evidence for this being involved in your current issue, but it may be related.

Thanks.

[JaspalX]

Google says you've got 21,800+ pages indexed and majestic says 496 linking RDs...so that sounds okay. Are any of the links spammy perhaps?.

OSE shows a lot of exact match links from forums etc. (at first glance) - did you know that?

They don't look particularly spammy... do you know how your link profile compares to competitors or (better) the people ranking higher than you?

[Prime85]

Thanks to both of you for help.

Brian: I believe i fell off of the first page for the main keywords i use, examples: plastic bins, plastic storage bins, plastic storage containers and many others.

In terms of link building, i am submitting my website to a whole bunch of online directories, promoting it through social media sites like facebook, twitter, and google +, I am submitting it to a bunch of social bookmarking sites, i am posting relevant comments on blogs with my keyword as the anchor text (legit comments, adding value to discussion, not just saying "great, thanks for writing", and also joining the discussion on forums and using the signature field to put links (but all comments are real and relevant and add value to the convos, not spam)

Jassy:  how do i find out if my backlinks are spammy?  I'd love to know.... and what do you mean by : OSE shows a lot of exact match links from forums etc.

Thanks again

[JaspalX]

I did a quick scan through the links on OSE and it seems like many of them are links with anchor text that matches your products 100%  - I certainly didn't do any kind of exhaustive or thorough review. Perhaps you could try using this http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-profile-tool-to-discover-linking-activity to compare your link profile against competitors?

By spammy, I meant (for example) your site appearing in a long list of unrelated sites - in what is obviously a paid link. I'm not sure if that would be the cause though.

BTW, I just noticed that I'm seeing a toolbar pagerank of 1, if the site had a higher toolbar pagerank before, that might be a clue that google has somehow devalued your site...but I'd treat that with a heavy pinch of salt.

Like Brian, I see you on page one of google US (I tried plastic bins) and DA is lower than others, in fact I'd say you're actually doing rather well compared to the other sites!

[Prime85]

I did a quick scan through the links on OSE and it seems like many of them are links with anchor text that matches your products 100%  ---- Jassy: I typically comment on both blogs and forums using anchor text, i thought that was a good practice... However, the comments i am making/writing/posting are all relevant to the topic being discussed.

your site appearing in a long list of unrelated sites - in what is obviously a paid link. I'm not sure if that would be the cause though. ----**  I don't pay for links, i do pay for advertisements on one website.  There is a picture of my products (right hand column) with the alt tag as "plastic bins"...  Is this frowned upon by Google?  I thought as long as I'm buying an ad, on a decent website (PR of 5), that is actually encouraged, no?**

BTW, I just noticed that I'm seeing a toolbar pagerank of 1, if the site had a higher toolbar pagerank before, that might be a clue that google has somehow devalued your site...but I'd treat that with a heavy pinch of salt.--- My PageRank has never been higher than 1, however i am now checking that all the time to make sure it doesn't drop down to zero

Like Brian, I see you on page one of google US (I tried plastic bins) and DA is lower than others, in fact I'd say you're actually doing rather well compared to the other sites! ----  For some reason, i don't see myself on page 1 anymore for these terms, and i am cleaning cache and resetting history, are you positive i am really ranking there for Google US?

Thanks

[JaspalX]

Tyler, don't worry too much about the page rank - it only gets updated a few times each year and is (at best) a very, very rough measure.

Ads are fine and the one you've described sounds perfectly okay.

I'm in the UK and used geoedge proxy to search google.com - that showed your site about half-way down the serp. Try a new browser, if you use firefox, install chrome/safari/opera and try a few searches on one of them..but two of us have reported you're ranking okay...

You could also try adding &pws=0 to the end of the url after you've done a google search to try and de-personalise it.

Also, there are a stack of rank checkers...have you tried any, seomoz has one.

Are you seeing a fall-off in search traffic commensurate with the drop you're seeing in rankings? If yes, then investigate further, if no, then perhaps there's nothing to worry about.

[Prime85]

Jassy,

Thanks for all of your help....

our traffic is fairly slow today, but not a big enough sample size.  if it remains low, i will report back and ask for advice...

Thanks!