Why does our main keyword keep dropping?

[TheGreatestGoat]

Hey Guys,

We've seen an alarming drop in our main keyword for our website. Our biggest driver of traffic has always been the search term 'gifts for men' which we commanded the top spot for a while, but have always been in the top 4 for.

Recently (in the last 3-4 months) we dropped to 6 and as of last night we dropped down to 9th.

We still rank number 2 for 'gift ideas for men'. Both search terms point to this page: GIfts For Men

Nothing onsite or technically has changed, and there is consistently new content in the form of products being added almost daily.

We hit a manual action back in October of last year and I'm concerned that the toxic links (that we didn't create mind you) we disavowed may have been unnaturally boosting this page and now we're dropping significantly because they're gone.

Any ideas on how we can curb this concerning trend?

Thanks a lot

[MattAntonino]

Do you know that the read more tag on that page actually displays less and read less actually displays more?

When I put that page through Pingdom Melbourne I get a 5.09 second load time and 1.6 MB page size. That's a bit long and you get a 45/100 (red) score on Google Developer's Tool for mobile and a 70/100 on desktop: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.yellowoctopus.com.au%2Funique-gifts%2Fgifts-for-men

The site at #1 gets a 79/100 mobile and 92/100 desktop and is only 209 kb and loads in 2.37 seconds on Pingdom: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bol6kH/http://www.giftsforblokes.com.au/

You have what looks to me like some link spam going on. There are 30 domains that link to you on just one IP address and another 20 from a second IP. That's 50 domains across just two IP addresses. The odds of that being natural are astronomical and very, very unlikely. https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/referring/v2/ips/subdomains/fresh/all/1/refdomains_desc?target=yellowoctopus.com.au

You also have a staggering number of links from .org, .net, .uk, .ru, .de, .info and so on. This is also a high indicator of link manipulation. The site at #1 doesn't have this issue at all.

The vast, vast majority of your backlinks come from images and the anchor text is your brand, not anything to do with men. 45% of your links over time have been deleted, also a very bad quality sign: https://majestic.com/reports/site-explorer?folder=&q=yellowoctopus.com.au

The site I see at #1 is roundly kicking your site's tail at every corner. The site I see at #2 loads a slightly larger page than you but does it in much less time: http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/dW9TDy/hardtofind.com.au  Most of the sites above you also have a better (clean) backlink profile. Hardtofind has over 23,000 links showing up in Majestic, which is huge. Only about 15% of their links are images where yours is closer to 80%. Only 20% of their links are nofollow while 50% of yours are.

Your page is the only one in the top 6 that uses meta keywords and you use them a little bit "old school" - they can generally only be a negative ranking factor and it seems they aren't helping you.

The content across all 4 pages is quite the same so it shouldn't matter that much.

I would say your slightly spammier link profile, slightly slower load times and slightly fewer dofollow, good links are pushing you down. Their stuff is, frankly, better at the moment. And I see DJs and Kmart above you - bad luck about that but if they want your category you're going to have to spin miracles to beat them.

I would check Search Console for a penalty notification although this is most likely an algorithmic adjustment. Those links aren't counting for you. If someone did a disavow on them they may have also gone "too far" with it. It's hard to say. I would check search console settings, including claiming all versions of the site and make sure the HTTPS and www version are your preferred versions.

Then I would try to draw non-image links to the page, maybe add some new content above or below products, work on your link profile overall and push the domain as a whole as well.

[LoganRay]

Hi,

I'm trying to read over your content and it just keeps loading more products. Very frustrating. You should consider pagination and having a default amount of products load on the page.

Regarding your internal links, you have one the says "2000 gifts for men" and one that says "shop gifts for men". These links point to the page the exist on, with a hashed URL. Links should never point to the same URL on which they live, I see this a lot and its very frustrating, it looks spammy to search engines, and is confusing/frustrating/irritating for searchers. They click that link only to be taken to the top of this long page again? Not a good user experience. There's also a link for your homepage buried in "..." in the first paragraph, that also looks spammy/cloaky to me.

I'm not saying these page load and internal linking issues are your whole problem, but they're definitely not helping your situation and the simplest things like this should be tackled first.

There are no external links pointing to this page, if your competitors have similar pages with some recently acquired good quality external links to them, this is potentially the cause of your recent decline.