Rankings appear mixed up causing huge drop in organic

[entrepreneurhandbook]

Hi,

Our top page appears to have dropped out of the index. The core keyword "business ideas" is still showing us at the top but it's a different post and it's lost all the long-tail. Whats even stranger is that it's not even directly relevant to the topic of business ideas.

Looks like something fishy happened here – perhaps due to the recent algo updates.

We've always seen a significant increase in organic when anything Panda related updates (c.20%+ growth every time) yet this has compeltely killed us. We spent a long time building this post up, eventually outranking Entrepreneur.com. It's been #1 for Google.co.uk for months.

Any help would be MASSIVELY appreciated!

ikvJVrq

[Mobilio]

Google released "core update" on 8 and 15:
http://mozcast.com/
https://algoroo.com/
http://serp.watch/

Lot of SEO (including in Moz) trying to catch what's changed. This isn't Panda or Penguin.

[Dr-Pete]

At this point, other than "It's not Penguin, probably" we don't have much insight into what's been going on over the past week, other than that, as Peter N. said, multiple tools are showing rankings shake-ups.

If you're talking about a total loss of top pages, though, I think it can be premature to assume it was an update in play. I'd definitely thoroughly check the technical aspects. Are these pages still being index? Are they being cached properly? Do they show up for longer-tail or exact-match terms (in quotes) - in other words, have they dropped in ranking or are they ranking for nothing at all? The more you can pin down, the better.

Unfortunately, it's very hard to speak in generalities and tell you what factors were involved in this week's updates. It really takes a deep dive into the site(s) in question.