Solving a Mystery

[ahirai]

I've been banging my head trying to solve a mystery for a few months, with little luck. Maybe one of you has an answer.

My home page organic SERP rankings have dropped from #1 or #2 late last year, to between #8 and #25 a few months ago for a couple of important keywords.

I did not make any on-page changes during this period.

Meanwhile, many inner pages continue to rank well (top 5) for long-tail keywords.

All of my SEO is white hat, no unusual on-page tactics, no purchased or otherwise fishy backlinks. In fact, looking closely at the on-page and backlink tactics of some of the websites that have leapfrogged ahead of me, I'd say some of them have (and continue to) engaged in shady practices.

No errors reported by SEOmoz. I've been judiciously applying canonical tags and other techniques to ensure minimal duplicate content.

I've not received a letter from Google warning me of any unnatural backlink profiles.

The biggest part of the mystery is that it seems like my home page was the only page really affected. As mentioned above, the inner pages continue to rank well for their respective keywords. Thus, I don't think I've been hit by any kind of site-wide penalty.

Also, I continue to rank well on Bing/Yahoo.

Does anybody have an insight into what could have happened? Has anybody else experienced anything similar (home page dropping rank while other pages stay put)?

[warnerdata]

About what date did the drop occur?  If around April 24th, the it was an algorithm update that changed you.

Has your server had any downtime or slowness to it?

And, lastly what's the keyword you fell in (and  I assume it's for the site in your profile)?

[ahirai]

There's actually been a steady and gradual decline in organic traffic since around early February.

I'd rather not say which website or what keywords in a public forum, but I'd be happy to discuss it privately.

The Google Webmaster Tools "site performance" chart shows a period of slow performance for the first half of April. There was also a brief website outage about 2 weeks ago - I don't think it lasted more than 10 minutes.

Thanks for your thoughts on this.

[warnerdata]

You can PM me it and see I can help you track it down.

Early Feb 3 Google announced 17 search quality highlights which they mention and update to Panda for quality sites.  Your site might have been caught up in that.

[ahirai]

I'm sure it IS algorithm-related. The strange thing is that it doesn't seem to have affected all of my pages/rankings equally. I'll PM you shortly.

[TakeshiYoung]

Google's algorithm is changing all the time, even out side of the big named updates, so it's natural for rankings to fluctuate for specific keywords.

Have you noticed any fluctuations among the other sites in SERPs?  If that's the case, Google could have rolled out a change that affects queries of that type.

It could also be possible that your competitors have stepped up their SEO efforts over that time, how have their backlinks been growing, and how do their link profiles compare to yours?

Finally, links tend to lose value over time as blog posts are pushed into archives, sites go down or get penalized, pagerank goes down, etc.  How has your link building been during that time period?  If you're not suffering from an actual penalty like Penguin, the best strategy would be to make sure your on-page factors are solid and continue building better links.

[ahirai]

Hi Takeshi,

My competitors for the specific keywords I'm talking about have stayed fairly static in the rankings. I haven't noticed any on-page changes for any of them during this period (I check frequently) and I haven't noticed any major changes in backlink profiles (I use Raven and Majestic in addition to SEOmoz Pro).

Over the same period, my site's on- and off-page SEO factors did not change either, and yet my site dropped >10 spots relative to competing sites for these specific keywords.

Meanwhile, other pages of my site continued to rank well for other keywords - so if it was an algo change, it's an algo change that only affected my home page for certain keywords, while leaving my other pages and my competitor's pages alone.

Strange, no?

[warnerdata]

I did a review of his keywords and his site is competitive link wise with the top 3.  The only thing I could find was duplicate content which would play into the timing of the Panda update.

[TakeshiYoung]

Yeah, that is weird.  Rankings shift all the time though.  If it wasn't a named algo update, it could be just some change that Google made to the algo.

For example, if you have a lot of sitewide links (or blog links, or directory links) it could be that Google lowered the value of those for your type of query, relative to other types.  Or some of the sites that are linking to you could have been penalized for selling links, or seen a drop in pagerank, or got shifted into a different niche from your site, which lowered their value.

Whatever the case, unless you're being directly penalized for something, your best bet is to just build more links.  If your competitors have high value links that you don't, that could be a good starting point for regaining your ranking for your keyword and improving your site traffic overall.

[ahirai]

I think Guy Warner nailed it. I wrote the copy for my home page back in 2004. I've tweaked it over the years, but it remained largely the same. During that time, lots of others have been copying the text for their own websites. Now, if you search for an exact match, a few of the other sites come up even higher in the SERP than my own site!

I've done my best to get folks to remove the copies (and serving DMCA complaints when necessary) but I think my time is better spent simply rewriting the home page.

It's frustrating on one hand, but it's also good to finally have an idea of what the problem might be.

Thanks, Guy!