Website slipped for particular keyword this year

[chopchop]

www.schupepetents.co.nz

I am webmaster for this site which slipped in rankings around 18/1/13. It was doing really well for keyword "marquee hire" ranking 6-8 for google.co.nz. It is now ranked about 30.

Background. It has been ranked well for keyword for about 3 years. From what I can see there was a few websites that tumbled around this time. The website has been completely redone to a wordpress site this was in December last year. The switch was done before putting in 301 re directs to preserve internal page rank. As a result the internal page rank of pages has had to start again!

Three things from online research into what has potentially affected this:
1. Lack of website substance. As website has been redone it has lost Google "esteem" (lack of internal pages PR). But the time that it dropped was a long time after the site redesign.
2. Possible penalty for too high proportion of links from directory websites. Heard some whispers from forums that this had happened. But links are not just from directories.
3. Too many links with specific keyword (marquee hire) for junk sites. This is possibly true but why the drop at that time when no one else experienced this.

Also we hired a company mid last year who link bombed using "marquee hire" and a couple other keywords.

Moz seems to be very happy with the website!! Good link scores and on-page optimisation is great.

Wondering what has happened?!

[NakulGoyal]

This is a very very common problem. What you need to do is step back for a minute and think of this not like a website, but like a real business.

1. Are the search engines seeing the signals they are looking for from a real business from your website ?
2. If you are targeting one and only one primary keyword, that's a wrong approach. Think beyond one primary keyword.
3. The points you mentioned about directory links, anchor text links and link "bombing" are obviously clear signs of problems.
4. Do you control those links ? Are there any natural links ? Have you received a unnatural links penalty ?

Do a complete audit of your backlinks and clean up what you can.

[chopchop]

1. Are the search engines seeing the signals they are looking for from a real business from your website ? On the most part yes. The website has good original content and is a professional website. The website is updated with new content at least once a month.
2. If you are targeting one and only one primary keyword, that's a wrong approach. Think beyond one primary keyword. Kind of! the keyword is has been targeted more but others such as marquee hire auckland, schupepe marquee hire, tent hire and stretch tents are other keywords.
3. The points you mentioned about directory links, anchor text links and link "bombing" are obviously clear signs of problems. Possibly
4. Do you control those links ? Are there any natural links ? Have you received a unnatural links penalty ? I contacted google about a manual penalty and they said no.

Do a complete audit of your backlinks and clean up what you can. A good idea.

To me though it could be a simple case of dropping off because of the new website been put in. The site dropped off about 18-19 January. Below is from webmaster tools. It seems to be too much of a coincidence that this has happened at the same time?

In google reconsideration request (I was checking to see if the website was manually penalised – it wasn’t) they hinted at the above (server stops serving pages) which was around 6/1/13 and it gets to the lowest around the same time as the rankings drop.

Also it states if you’ve changed the URLs for a large portion of your sites pages”