Lost ranking and can't figure out why

[Roots7]

My page http://www.drschulmanplasticsurgery.com/body/buttock-lift-augmentation-new-york-city/ recently moved from first page to past the 15th. I was never penalized on the last update and have very few links pointing to this page. I can't figure out why i just moved so far back. Can anyone offer some advice?

[Njave_MCP]

Simple answer (which you wont like) is that nobody has a good idea why it happens. I had a site where no links were created drop significantly in rankings. Why? Have no real idea. Content is good, your social media signals are good, wait a few days and check it out then.

[TomRayner]

Hey there

As you'll probably be aware, we have just had the latest Penguin algorithm update, aimed at devaluing low quality and manipulative links.

Of the links pointing to your page, I'd say that probably all of them look manipulative and look to have been built for a search engine.

The sites in question look like link farms - a blog network that links out to a number of unrelated health niche websites (and some random ones).  There's very little value on show for a user, each article looks placed to provide an optimised anchor text backlink to a number of websites.

In addition, each domain looks like it has once expired and been bought up someone and turned into a blog network, probably on the premise that the domains were old and carried PR, DA and PA, so would pass decent link equity.  The anchor text pointing to your website all look targeted as well.

Basically, nearly every link to that page looks artificial, placed for a search engine and intended to pass PageRank, without offering anything for a user. It's exactly the sort of link that this Penguin update would try and target, so it's no great surprise to me that you have lost your rankings.

My advice would be try and get the links removed ASAP.  Last resort would be to use the disavow tool.  You may need to wait until the next algorithm refresh to see the effect of removing/disavowing the links take place - the last time Penguin refreshed was 6 months ago prior to yesterday, so we can only hope the new version will refresh monthly.

In the mean time, I would concentrate on earning links by offering quality content, resources or guides to your users.  Contact webmasters and bloggers in your field that could benefit from your expertise, or alternatively promote the content on your own blog and use marketing, PR and social media to attract attention to it.

Hope this helps.

[Njave_MCP]

Tom, would you state that Google takes the spammy links into account and devalues website rankings which have good links with them as well, or is it simply Google removing those spammy link domains as any relevant source of link importance and thus making the websites loose rankings just for the simple fact these domains hold no real value with Google now? Thanks!

[Roots7]

Tom,

Most of the links are from his internal blog. They are adding in the catagory pages and tag pages which i have set to not index in my seo plugin. There are only a few external links from sites that are general health blogs that have good page authority. The anchor text for those has been different every time. Is there a different tool you are using to see backlinks. I am using open explorer her on seomoz.org.

[jesse-landry]

From my experience with this latest update (not even 24 hours old, mind you) it seems to be more of the latter than the former. I'm seeing sites that had a mix of good/poison links sit around the same placement while sites with nothing but spam links dropped off the face of the earth.

Again though, this is early and one teeny tiny little example out of the billions of pages out there.