Why a drop in certain keyword but not others?

[YNWA]

Hi.

I am looking into a potential clients SEO issues and reasons why their rankings for specific keywords that they ranked for have dropped but others stayed the same or sometimes have improved.

They received a manual spam action that was revoked after some disavow and so on. In May of this year they noticed a huge drop in more generic terms.

The main keyword that was ranked 6th, dropped to 35th yet other keywords rose slightly.

I have noticed this issue for another potential client as well. They ranked 1st for their brand name, then received a spam action that was revoked. Now they do not rank for their brand name but do for other long tail keywords?

Any ideas the best way to investigate this or root out the issue and build to improve rank for more generic keywords?

Thanks

[MattAntonino]

These type of scenarios are very hard to diagnose without specific details such as the text of the penalty and what the site is but let me give you a few reasons:

1. Anchor text way over done for the brand or for a main keyphrase. This can result in lowered rankings on that keyphrase while maintaining authority on others.

2. Specific penalty addressing these anchors, particular links that have now been devalued totally, etc. If you had a lot of links to "keyphrase 1" anchors and then Google devalued & penalised those links, you'd rank for other terms but not those.

If the brand name is fairly generic, overcooked anchors would be my first guess - but again, it's just a guess. There are probably 6-10 different potential causes of this.

[YNWA]

Thanks for your response.

Anchor text is where my thoughts lie.

I think there could be something here as they do have lots of exact match anchor terms for their brand name. plus one of the dropped keywords is that term. Not phrase but one word term.

Say their brand name is Gym Shack. They have dropped considerably for the term Gym whilst maintaining or improving for Gyms in England or MMA Gyms.

This is where I am leaning towards.

What can be done here if Google is devaluing the term Gym? Is it the links that need removing or does the focus need to shift somehow?

Thanks