Big changes in beginning of december

[Lobtec]

For one of our biggest sites I noticed a big difference in ranking drops in the beginning of december. The site is in Swedish so the google updates are a bit different than for google.com. For many of our keyword we dropped far down in the SERPs. Most of the keywords we had at top 10, or top 20, but these got first dropped down to 100/150+ but since then they have started to gain a bit, not near the previous results though.

For our main keyword (a really high competitive keyword) we got dropped totally (+200). The site is about 7 years old, have good content, regulary updated (1-2 news a day, 2-4 new articles a week).

Our traffic is still pretty good, actually almost the same as previous the big drop for the "hard" keyword. We seem to get more traffic for our long tail keywords instead, which is good. I would like be able to get traffic from both types of keywords though.

One more thing to add. I have notice that a couple of our competitors, both in this area and other, also got hit in the same way. This should mean that some sort of google update/filter has hit us.

So, in short, my question is if anyone knows about a update/filter in the beginning of december for the Swedish market. And, how can we work ourselves back?

Edit: Also, the site ranks number one for the titel of the page and for the titel of the hard keywords, the site also ranks number one. The "right" pages also gets in the top when I do a seach for "site:domain.com keyword".

[RankSurge]

I don't have a specific answer in regards to the Swedish market, but if this happened to me, I would go on the notion that some links that are pointing to the site have been devalued, based on the other information you provided.

Sounds like an effort to earn high quality authority links will be needed to re-gain those rankings.

[Lobtec]

Perhaps you are right about the links but it feels strange that we have dropped that far down in that case. We have around PA 57 and DA 48 with almost 250 root domains linking which is quite high comparing to the competitors. Even though some of the links got devaluated, we shouldn't drop 100-200 places for many of our more difficult keywords.

I will continue working with the links, and go through the onpage seo to see if I can turn things around. Would be sad to let the site go.