Wrong page ranking and rank drop, help!

[rdudkiewicz]

Dear Moz community I would like to hear your advice about our current SEO problems. Our website is www.poolsonline.nl. This is a website where people can learn the Polish language on our website. This website has been online since 2007. The website got really outdated, so we built and launched a new version on March 1st (one month ago).

We have created a salespage that we would like to rank for the keywords 'cursus Pools' (Polish course) first of all and 'pools leren' (learn Polish) secondly. The page is https://www.poolsonline.nl/cursus-pools-leren-spreken/

The old website was on rank 4-5 (roughly) for 'cursus Pools' and 'pools leren'. When we launched the new website we were on the top 5 with two of our pages. We were even on rank 1 and our salespage was also showing on the first page and often also in the top 5 (below the 'wrong' page of ours). We got quite a lot of trafic and new clients. However the problem was that the wrong page was ranking higher. We wanted our salespage to rank and not our home page (https://www.poolsonline.nl/) and not our free lesson (https://www.poolsonline.nl/lessen/groeten-en-gesprek-voeren-in-het-pools-les-1/).

So what we did:

1. Read/watched recourses about this problem: https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday and https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions and others.

2. Removed the keywords (cursus pools en Pools leren) from the wrong pages (home and free lesson pages).

3. Optimized the Salespage for these keywords

4. Improved internal linking with these key words to our salespage

5. Worked on link building for our salepage. We got about 5-10 links to our salespage in the first week of March (5 seems to be significant for this competition and we are working on more). These links are not yet in Moz OSE, but Google has indexed these pages and links. For reference, here are some of these links (not all):

6. http://www.iculture.nl/apps/ik-spreek-pools-taalcursus-pools-op-iphone/

7. http://linktopoland.com/nl/cursus-pools-leren-spreken/

8. http://naukaholenderskiego.pl/artykuly/aplikacje/rozmawiamy-po-niderlandzku-aplikacja-na-iphone-i-ipad/

9. http://pnkv.nl/nieuwsbericht.php?bericht=rozmowy-po-polsku-juz-po-6-miesiacach 

10. http://poolsewoorden.nl/pools-leren/aanmelden/

11. http://poniderlandzku.nl/

12. Shared and promoted our salespage on social media

What we expected:

• Our salespage to show up on top for these keywords
• Our ranking to improve

What happened:

• Our salespage disappeared all together from the search results for these search terms (it does show up for more specific search queries, for example 'cursus pools leren spreken')
• Our site seems to keep dropping lower and lower. We are now on the bottom of page 1 or on page 2 for 'cursus Pools' and 'Pools leren' and not with the desired page

Questions we have for you to help us:

1. Why do you think our salespage is not showing up anymore for these keywords ('cursus pools' and 'pools leren')?
2. Do you think we got a penalty for over optimization or bad links?
3. What can we more to get our salespage to rank for these keywords? (we are working on building/earning more links)
4. What can we do to restore our rankings and not drop lower anymore?
5. Do we need to give our efforts more time? How long?
6. Any other adivce?

Thanks so much in advance!

[Guest]

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[rdudkiewicz]

Thank you James. We are just keeping things as they are right now and working on backlinks.

Any more ideas from others on this topic? For what it's worth I also discover a potential bad/penalty link. I asked another question about this here.