UK Company Major drop in traffic & rankings on one primary keyword since March

[bjalc2011]

I am helping out a small UK company who have had a sudden drop in organic search traffic since March 24th.

Investigation highlights some issues with the site,e.g. Potential canonicalization of home page, a few html errors, some inbound links to the /index.html version of the homepage rather than /. But, nothing particualrly major and nothing that is different to pre-March 24th.

The indexed pages looks ok in Google (although Bing is ranking the non-www version of the homepage) but this does not appear in Google's index.

Searches for the company name on Google.co.uk show it as top result & some keywords are ranking reasonably well (based on homepage). Selecting blocks of text from the homepage and it ranks #1, but its Google rank for the primary keyword has gone from #2 pre-March 24th to not in the top 100 results since. SEOMOZ is grading the page A for the keyword which appears prominently on the page & keyword is the first characters of the title. It is not a particularly competitive keyword. Adding UK to the keyword and the page is Google.co.uk ranked #3. It's almost as if they are being penalised for a single keyword which I've never seen or heard of before. Any ideas?

** The company has never carried out any SEO - white hat or black hat. The site is perfectly normal, nothing dodgy or concerning about it at all.**

Thanks in advance for your advice.

[kchan]

Hello,

Was it a inner page that was ranking for the key phrase before? In the Google Webmaster tool were there any warning messages?  After Google's latest algorithm changes for 'over optimised seo' I've actually seen a few sites being punished for single keywords.

[bjalc2011]

Hi kchan, thanks for your reply. No, it was the homepage.that was the ranking page. GWT reported a drop in traffic warning but nothing else. Hard to see how this site could have been caught up as over optimised, as no SEO ever carried out!