Sudden and Aggressive Fall in Rankings

[mj775]

I have seen a sudden and aggressive drop in rankings for my site. The site was ranking #4 for rental insurance and now sits at #9. It was ranking #16 for renters insurance and now dropped to #171. We vary anchor text in our link building campaign and focus on getting links from PR3+ sites as well as produce content for quality sites in exchange for being a featured author + link. The site has not been over optimized (i.e. keyword stuffing, etc.).

I would appreciate any insight into what could be causing this significant drop in rankings and what my course of action is to reinstate my rankings - Penguin?

[zigojacko]

Some questions that should help point us in the right direction:-

1. At what point did you see a decline in organic search rankings?
2. What were the last changes made to your digital marketing strategy prior to noticing the decline?
3. Do you or have you previously paid for links? (I'm referring to your link profile here).
4. What do you feel determines a "quality site" (in your words)?

[mj775]

1. The decline started about a week ago.

2. There had not been any changes in our digital marketing strategy. We have been building links in the same way since February 2012. The strategy had been to acquire PR3+ one way links with varying anchor text from a variety of link types (i.e. permanent one way links, contextual links & directory links). Anchor text varies from renters insurance, rental insurance, renters insurance quotes, renters insurance quote, renter insurance, buy renters insurance online, affordable rental insurance, etc. 'Renters insurance' links didn't exceed 40% of the backlink profile while rental insurance was the next closest in terms of volume at 20%.

3. The only paid links we have acquired were from directories but those paid links make up a very small amount of our links. Almost all of the links you see in Open Site Explorer were acquired from content relationships although OSE shows a very limited number of our links.

4. We determine a quality site as relevant in topic, PR3+ and does not link to questionable neighborhoods.

I would appreciate any insight you  can provide as we thought we were staying within G's quality guidelines and now we have been (at least is appears) penalized.

[mj775]

Hey Geoff-

Not sure if you received my response but I would appreciate your thoughts on this.

[zigojacko]

Thanks for the information you provided...

I believe the shift in rankings will be primarily due to a weak link profile for your domain but also a stronger backlink profile from some of your competitors which has seen them rise above you in the organic rankings. These changes coming since the additional Penguin algorithm updates rolled out by Google. (Incidentally, have you seen a decline in Yahoo/Bing if you monitor positions at these search engines too)?

When seeking link opportunities, it's not advisable to chase PR - if 95% of your backlinks all come from pages with a PR3+, then this in itself looks unnatural and will have been a signal flagged.

It is also possible, that those domains you have previously sourced backlinks from via building content relationships could also have suffered as a result of the latest algorithm updates - if they look to sell/provide backlinks using their page PR as selling point, and subsequently link out to various websites from sidebar placements (which they do looking at some of the pages containing your backlinks), this could also have made your domain suffer as less weight/authority is being passed through your links.

I would recommend acquiring some new backlinks, don't worry about the PR of a page and don't focus on using keywords in your anchor text. Perhaps consider some guest content at a few blogs, writing a few pieces of content at each related to your products/services using an author byline with branded backlinkS - for example:-

<name>is the marketing manager at RentalInsurance.org for a leading provider of renters insurance in New York.</name>

Perhaps also consider contributing via comments to some blogs, doesn't matter whether backlinks are nofollow or otherwise, just ensure your brand and where possible,link back to your site (using your name for commenting instead of keywords) via making some relevant and genuine comments to other blogs.

Build a few handfuls of backlinks such as these which will counterweight the links in your existing backlink profile and ensure there are some more genuine and natural links being built.

I would expect this to prove a step in the right direction however there is also the possibility Google could also be looking at onsite elements and the practically exact match domain name too which have also seen changes from recent algorithm updates.

Hope that helps for now.