My Domain Authority is high but don't rank in serps

[Shajan]

So i'm a beginner/intermediate SEO and uptil about 3 weeks ago i enjoyed Top 3 rankings for all my keywords(VIrtual Assistant,Virtual Assistants, Virtual Personal Assistant,Virtual Personal Assistants and so on) for my site www.247VirtualAssistant.com. All of a sudden i dropped in rankings and  can't figure out why. I ran a link analysis and nothing looks like it changed, in fact i still command much higher domain authority than my competition, but i'm stuck on the bottom of the 2nd page. I can't tell if i'm being penalized, if the other sites all of sudden just outperformed me or something else is happening here. I've also noticed a lot of "dancing" in my serps, I've been in 2nd last position on the 2nd page, then 1st of the third page, then last on the 2nd page and so on. Can someone please help me make sense of this?? Thanks!

Thomas, a very confused an desperate website owner

[Thommas]

I don't think you're being penalized, you wouldn't just drop one page down. I suggest you take a good look at all the recent changes you've made on and off site. This could be the case of some of your links being lost or devalued.

Higher DA does not guarantee better ranking, it does help your pages to rank better but you still have to optimise them for your keywords.

[Marcus_Miller]

Sounds like you could have been caught up in the latest panda update or you have some other quality related issues. As a quick check I ran your homepage through copyscape.com and it came back with 10 or more matches and I tried googling a chunk of your text which came back with more than 100 other matching sites:

Google this in the double quotes to see what I mean:

"Would you like to know more about Virtual Assistants? Fill out the form below for a FREE consultation!"

You have uniqueness issues for starters so looks like you have been filtered my friend. I would give this a read for starters:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

Then make an honest appraisal of your site and your content. A batch crawl with copyscape would be a good idea and then just remove or rewrite the weak or duplicate stuff and you will make your way back into the rankings if everything else is straight.

Hope it helps

Marcus

[Confetti_Wedding]

Hi Shajan,

I've only taken a quick look at your homepage but it looks as though you might well be over optimising. The phrase "virtual assistant appears" 38 times on the page which is too much considering the amount of text on the page. It doesn't read very naturally. There was a great post on SEOmoz a couple of weeks back which you might want to take a look at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lessons-learned-by-an-over-optimizer-14730

Hope that helps,

Brendan.

[Shajan]

Thank you, that makes a lot of sense and it's something I've wanted to combat for a little while. I beleive i can fix the copscape problem by just rewritng all my content but duplicate content on my site itself("Would you like to know more about Virtual Assistants? Fill out the form below for a FREE consultation!") comes from my contact form which is on most of my pages. Do i need to have a unique version on each page?

Thank you! This site and this community rocks!

[bradkrussell]

I'm not 100% sure of the latest follow vs nofollow ratio guidelines, but running your homepage URL through OSE suggests that maybe too many of your top links are nofollow (18 out of your top 50) - most seem to be fairly spammy blog type comments. Perhaps try and target less spammy links?

Just trying to be helpful, please don't take it the wrong way.

Brad