Keywords loosing positions whats best can be done?

[mtthompsons]

Hi,

Keywords loosing positions whats best can be done?

We have 1,000's of keywords we receive traffic each day and new ones added daily and many loose from position 1 to 10 or more

What can we do to get back to position1 or the first page?

Any tips i could get?

Thanks

[Devanur-Rafi]

Hi, before doing anything, I would recommend you to please wait for 2 to 3 weeks if you have not already done so. After any update, it is quite common to see a fluctuation in positions. If you have already waited for more than 3 weeks and still see heading South, the first thing (if there were no changes made to the website recently) to check would be the link profile of your website to make sure there are no spammy links in there.

The link evaluation flow chart from Bruceclay can be of great help in this regard:

http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2012/06/link-removal-flowchart/

You can go ahead accordingly. Assuming that the drop in rankings is because of recent Penguin update, you will have to initiate the process of getting rid of all those bad links, document them properly and submit them to Google and request for reconsideration. Here you go for more in this regard:

http://moz.com/ugc/googles-disavow-tool-works-penalty-removal

Please go through the article as it has links to everything that you might need in this regard.

Best,

Devanur Rafi.

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

I agree with Devanur, that you should wait if the change just happened.  Rankings are constantly fluctuating and are especially volatile after an update.  It's always good to let the dust settle a bit.

That said, if you find that your rankings continue to stay down (or it's already been a couple weeks) then you'll need to investigate the cause.  I wouldn't just assume the issue is with Penguin.  Start by checking to see if you've received any notifications of a violation of guidelines.  If not, check to see if there is a correlation between when your rankings dropped and any particular known Google update. If so, proceed with the appropriate means of addressing the issues related to that particular update.  If there is no obvious corresponding update, then analyze your site and it's link profile and check to see if there are any glaring issues either in the structure/functionality of the site or issues with the content or link profile of the site.  Start by addressing the obvious issues and then continue to do your best to continue to improve the site's content and authority.

Sorry I can't be more specific, but figuring out what caused a site to lose rankings is something that usually takes detailed investigation of the specific site and situation.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com

[mtthompsons]

Thanks

i am talking about the site that's not hit by any algorithm change and the keywords of few articles are dropping.

I wanted help with exact things i can try

Title change, Revisit the article content, Add images/Videos into the article?, have less links, any of such guidelines that i can work on...

[Kurt_Steinbrueck]

Ah, thank you for the clarification.

In that case, here are somethings you do:

• Review the on-page SEO of the articles and see if they are fully optimized for the keywords.  If not, then optimize the pages, but try not to fall into the trap of over-optimizing.
• Update the articles and republish them.  Freshness can affect rankings.
• Create a new version of the article and publish that.  I'm not talking about spinning, but rather if it's been a while since the article was written and perhaps there are some new things that could be added or old things that should be removed, you could create a new version.  In fact, in some situations, you may have articles that can be redone every year.
• Try to build some links to the articles.
• Share the articles on social networks and with bloggers in your niche who  might find the articles interesting and useful.

Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com