Single Keyword Penalty?

[LoudClear]

Hi guys,

I recently taken over SEO for strikebowling.com.au and I'm stumped to what has happened with the keyword 'Bowling' for the home page.

Historically they have been ranking 5-6 for the year and they do come up in the local results.

Start of September, bang they drop out of the top 100 for Bowling. No other words seem to be effected. However the keyword 'Bowling Alley' did improve around the same time for an internal page.

What could have happened? A single keyword penalty?

• No messages in Webmaster tools
• No dodgy link building

Look forward to some theories.

Regards,

Corey

[Debdulal]

_Yes, I have seen numerous occasions where single keyword lost its ranking whereas other keywords continue to rank well. Now if the webmaster tools did not receive any Warning mail, it is not a manual penalty. But if you have been building links heavily with that specific keyword within a network of blogs, it might happen that sites linking to your website lose their value and thus, the ranking of that specific keyword may suffer. _

_So, diversify the keyword and hope this will get fixed.  _

[LoudClear]

This was my original thinking. But there hasn't been any link building for the word Bowling. However "Strike Bowling Bar" the brand name is used quite often. Do you think this could impact it?

[Debdulal]

It could be, no way to tell. You need to diversify the anchor texts like this

best Strike Bowling Bar
most popular Strike Bowling Bar
watch out for the most popular Strike Bowling Bar etc.

_It would look natural.  _

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Corey

It certainly smells like a penguin type penalty against that one keyword but you can certainly do some digging to determine if whether it is that or if it is something else or if there are more keywords that are effected and you have just not noticed. I have also seen a few sites penalised on the brand name where it was an exact match so say the URL is http://www.exact-match.com then they are getting penalised for too many 'exact match' anchors. This seems easier to fix and I have had a couple of sites bounce back from this for the brand keyword without too much effort.

First thing I would do is examine to see what date this happened and whether other keywords were effected so we can identify a list of possible problem terms and problem anchor text.

1. Filter by that keyword in google analytics and determine the date this happened and see if it is on a known penguin date or date relating to any other search algorithm update - check against this list: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

2. Once you know the date, if it looks like a penguin problem, then check to see if other keywords are affected. To do this select a two week period in analytics starting at the day you had the problem and then select the compare to past option below the date to view the two weeks before and after.

Browse to Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic to get a list of all keywords and you can see the percentage that these have changed. Scroll through that list and see if there are other keywords that have lost traffic. (If you have some good rank checking you may  not need to do this but it's likely you will find more here if it is a penguin issue).

Once you have done that you can get a list of terms together and attempt to determine if you have problematic links. You can import your link profile from seomoz into a free tool called Link Detective that will allow you to filter the links easily by anchor and get a new spreadsheet for each anchor text (or you could divvy it all up in a spreadsheet but link detective gives us a few more details like the type of link).

Then, you can go through the manual task or reviewing the links to see if there are any problematic ones for that term alone.

There is a few more details of how I would go about this here:
http://www.bowlerhat.co.uk/blog/penguin-diagnosis-and-recovery-strategy/

Without a few more details it's hard to know exactly what the issue is but this is a very broad term yet that is a huge drop but if you follow the instructions above it should let you determine if this was a penguin type issue or something else entirely.

Also, there are sometimes fluctuations, so I would not panic too much. Your link profile looks pretty well okay to me, the linking sites (from a very quick look) seem okay and generally, it does not look like you should be punished for manipulative practices.

There is a lot of talk of a reshuffeling of the deck with no specific updates around the end of september so possibly, have a look, see if you can find anything fishy but also, hold fire, this may just resolve itself. http://www.seroundtable.com/september-2012-google-report-15652.html

One last thing, is this a good keyword? Does it convert? What is the value of traffic? Do they stay? Have the results moved around at all for other people as well?

Hope this helps!
Marcus

[LoudClear]

Hi Marcus,

Thanks for the reply.

Turns out my rank checking software has been using my geolocation and obviously when I was checking I didn't change my location.

Odd however is that the website ranks for 'Bowling' ever where expect for Melbourne and a few surrounding suburbs. Definitely something else I need to get to the bottom off.

Thanks for your answers guys.

Corey

[Marcus_Miller]

Ha, no worries, drama over.