Huge drop in ranking, but only for a single search term

[Safelincs]

Hello All,

We've just noticed a huge drop in ranking for one of our key search terms. On January 9th we dropped from page 1 (Google UK) to page 7 - out of the top 50 completely! Nothing has changed on the page for a number of months, and rankings for other search terms seem unaffected.

Has anyone else been affected recently in a similar manor?

Sorry if this sounds a little vague - but we're struggling to understand how this might have happened. It seems very odd that only this particular search term would be affected so dramatically.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[inizio]

Sorry, but this question is very difficult to answer. There might be tons of reasons why this happened. Might be one of those Penguins - killing some exact-match anchor texts.

[Morles]

From the brief description it sounds like the first thing to do is to check your link anchor text for the phrase that you don't rank for any more.  http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anchors?site=www.yourdomain.com if you see a high number next to the phrase for "Links ContainingThis Anchor Text" then it is pretty certain you need to work on that.

For many years if you wanted to rank for a phrase, then having it a lot in anchor text was a good thing : ) Those days are gone I'm afraid, moderation in all things, except brand building.

[PaulRonin]

I agree that it sounds like penguin or some other penalty is probably occuring, but all to often I think people forget to look at who took the top spot and why they are suddenly ranked.  This might offer some insite as to what you might need to do to regain the position besides just reviewing your backlink profile.

Best of luck!

[EvolveCreative]

This is very difficult to answer as others have said. I hate to do this, but shameless plug for my post here:

How To Recover From Google Penalties & Filters

It will help you figure out if you're looking at a penalty or not.

Thanks,

Dave

[sebastiankoch]

It is really likely that the penalty was because of anchor text over optimization.
check you backlink profile for that keyword. do you have many domains pointing at you with that keyword?

Remember that with penguin it the link profile have to look natural.

For homepage most links should be the brandname, variations of the url, and links like here you can XYZ ... etc
Only a few with keywords.
Check your anchor text profile in OSE.

Good luck!