Decline in ranking for a particular theme of keywords after Penguin 2.0

[PeteW]

Hi everyone

Last month we found on of our clients rankings were seeing significant declines in ranking (like from 3 to 28). This occurred around the time of the Penguin 2.0 update.

After further investigation we found that only a collection of keywords were affected. If we were hit by the algorithm update we would expect to find all keywords declining.

We have not been manually penalized and other keyword themes are seeing moderate day to day ranking improvements.

I know that rankings jump from day to day but a sudden decline of around 20 places for a theme of keywords isn't what we would expect.

Thanks all.

[WesleySmits]

What is your exact question?

It could be possible that you dropped ranking around the penguin 2.0 update. It doesn't necessarily have to do anything with penguin though. It could be that the user engagement around this area on your site has been less good because for example the information is out of date.

I could take a look at your site and see if i find anything which could have caused this if you give me the url and the set of keywords you have dropped ranking for.

[JBidigital]

Drop in a particular theme of keywords is not unusual. It is highly possible that the particular theme has more relevant content on other sites or you have probably done over linking with same anchor text for that theme of keywords.

We also saw the same trend happening for one of our clients, but we removed the links, improved the content, and the rank was back up.

[DougRoberts]

There's some other things to consider (which you may have already done.)

What other changes can you see in the SERPS for your affected keywords, in particular what's happened to your competitors. Are there new sites now competing in the SERPS?

By analysing the "SERP Landscape" after changes like this can (but not always) give you an insight as to whether it's just your site that's been affected, multiple sites or the entire SERP.

A 3 to 28 drop is pretty nasty. Has there been any movement since the drop or has the SERP remained stable?

[advent.pk]

Did you build backlinks from certain domain names for those keywords? May be Penguine 2.0 hit those sites who were providing you link juice and support such keywords.

Thanks

[experiencedays]

Without knowing the site and the keywords (why is everyone so protective over these, even within this community??), it's almost impossible to say.

3 to 28 is quite a jump, but if the terms revolve around a trending news story or a seasonal term then that's not unusual at all. I would be happy to look further if you want to provide more specifics.

[PeteW]

Thanks everyone. They keywords have hovered around the drop zone for a while now.

The unusual thing here is that the set of keywords have the same sort of back link profile as the rest of the keywords. We recently inherited the SEO work for this site and the previous agency used PR sites religiously with exact anchor matching text. I'm surprised that the site hasn't been hit as hard with the penguin update.

The industry is highly niche and so I doubt it will be revolving around a news story or current trend. Nevertheless we have lined up a competitor analysis.

Apologies for the lack of detail, the keywords effected mainly revolve around 'Carpet Protection'.

So the question here is whether we should take the risk and try removing these PR links (perhaps with Google disavow) or not.

[WorldText]

I'd be tempted to hang fire a little while before "fixing" the problem, and give it a while longer to shake out.

We had something very similar around the time of Penguin 2 on one of our sites, and like you for only a selection of our keywords.  Half of the dropped keywords have returned to roughly where they were.  Of the other half most have increased, but are still down compared to pre-Penguin.

One keyword went from 3rd to not in top 50 and back to 4th this week.

Aside from burning a fair bit of time trying to figure out what was going on and if we'd been partially Penguined, I'm not sure I'm any the wiser!  Nothing notable going on with key competitors, nothing news worthy or topical in the sector - just temporary obliteration of around a quarter of keywords.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

I had the same experience on a few sites.  Ranked #1 for over a year, dropped same day as penguin, but bounced back the next day.