Sudden keyword rankings drop

[cudge]

Hi,

My latest MOZ report has indicated there has been a significant drop in ranking for 65 keywords, some by as much as 30 places. This is not something I have experienced before and seems very drastic. Is there a reasonable explanation or fix for this?

Thanks for any advice!

[GPainter]

Could it be tied with the recent update ?

http://moz.com/blog/panda-4-payday-loan-2-and-ebays-very-bad-day

[cudge]

Seems like that could well be the case, thank you for that.

[Kingof5]

It certainly could be algorithm related, but I've seen it report every single one of my keywords drop out of the top 50 for Bing and Yahoo when none of them changed position. It's just weird like that sometimes.

[DoMiSoL]

Hi Chris,

there could be many reasons, but since something like that happened to me recently I'd like to share my experience.

Not always a penalty is because of inbound link, in my case was an outbound link.

My problem was that a malicious code was injected in the header.php of the WordPress theme, and there was an hidden link to some gambling or casino house in every page of my site.

The trick was that the link was absolutely invisible from the outside, I needed to check the source code to find it.

Yes, Google was punishing me, but Webmaster Tool didn't say a word!

I suggest you to use Xenu to check the outbound links of your website and see if you find something filthy.

Best regards,

DoMiSoL Rossini

[benjaminmarcinc]

There was a recent update that seemed to jumble the search results around a bit, try to wait it out and see if anything goes back before doing anything major.

[JaneCopland]

If you have been hit with one of the most recent updates, there may be no sign in your Webmaster Tools account like there would be if you had been handed a manual penalty for spam. Has anything stabilised for the site over the weekend? Check your Webmaster Tools account for any mention of a penalty, just in case more is explained in there. However, many sites' rankings changed significantly over the past week due to Panda and Google's "payday loans" changes.