Dropped 20 places!

[gaz3342]

Hi everyone,

I have spent the last 3 weeks using SEO Moz to improve the SEO of my website.

I have reduced the amount of crawl errors from 6000 to 600, I have optimized my on-page to A grade for 4 of my main keywords and have been posting keyword optimized blogs posts 3 / 4 times weekly.

My reward for this? A drop down to page 4 of Google for my main keyword and a very annoyed boss!

Can anyone think where I may have gone wrong?

Thanks

[TomRayner]

Hi Gareth

Has this been a recent drop or more of a gradual decline?  I'm guessing there's been no message in your webmaster tools?

You might be interested to see this post on the ongoing link devaluation updates.  I've certainly seen with a few websites that those sites with not necessarily bad links, as in those that go against Google TOS, but built on somewhat archaic practices, such as directories and article sites, have seen a dropdown in rankings.  If there was ever proof that not all links are created equally, this is it.

One of the ways you can check if this is the case is to check the search engine results for the rankings you've dropped in - what pages used to rank for those terms? Is it the same page for each one? That might suggest link devaluation.

[irvingw]

include the URL and main keyword(s) and we can take a look. It's hard to say without looking at the code.