What's with the Keyword Apocalypse?

[McCaldin]

Hi,

9 of my tracked keywords have dropped by over 20 ranks since last week.  The nastiest drops in ranking are by 36, 38, and 46 places.

For the last month I have been chipping away at the duplicate content with 301 redirects and was expecting my keyword rankings to improve slightly as a result of this; not the opposite.

I don't have any manual actions logged against my site and am at a bit of a loss to explain this sudden drop.

Any suggestions would be most welcome.

[MonicaOConnor]

Have you ever heard of the Google Dance?

I started working with a company in August and have been trying to fix some major SEO issues. What I noticed is that at the times I made several changes, 301s, on page changes, revising content, I would see a huge decrease in rankings one week and then they would start to level out over the next 2-3 weeks. This isn't atypical, it shouldn't concern you too much right now.

Here are a few suggestions. Google your keyword + the number of your company. There should be an arrow in the SERP next to your URL, click that and select "Cached". This will tell you if the engine has seen your changes yet or not. If it has been cached, just wait a week and see if it levels out a little better, or at least bounces back to where it was.

The second thing you should do is check your search impressions in webmaster tools. With the two big updates happening in the past 30 days a huge change in your search impressions could cause some of your keywords to move around until things even out. You want to look for search impressions that dip below your lowest average day before 10/17/14. This will tell you if Panda or Penguin are having an affect on your rankings. If they are, this could just be temporary as the rest of the penguin update unfolds.

I say give it a couple of weeks just to be safe. I wouldn't make any other changes just yet. You don't want to fall victim to over optimizing either.

Good Luck!

[McCaldin]

Hi Monica,

That all seems very sensible.  Thank you very much for your help.

[MonicaOConnor]

Anytime, if things don't settle down, private message me and I would be happy to help you further if I can.

[McCaldin]

I appreciate that, thank you.