Sudden big drop for keyword ranking this month -Numerous possible factors... which is most likely?

[Fennzil]

Hi

I have a fairly new site (domain around 1 year and 6 months old) and in December it was sitting on Google's second page for our main keyword "cv writing service"

In late December we had a couple of stories picked up by the press and got some really good contextual links from a handful of well known media sites with DA60 and above.

Naturally I thought this would have a positive effect on our position for our keyword so I checked and was shocked to see that the site is now sitting on page 4... A drop of 2 pages

Also my site has dropped one point in DA on the Moz open site explorer

I have some possible theroies for the drop but would really appreicate if anyone could point me in the right direction for the possible cause of this drop and what I need to focus on to fix tihs issue.

Theories....

1. I made some big changes to the copy of my homepage and aboutapge a few weeks before the stories were picked up - although the copy is still similar content and optimised for my keywords

2. I had some early SEO work done by a freelancer in the early days and I now realise that a lot of the links are very weak and on quite poor looking sites (although they are not flagged as spammy in OSE, I think they are spammy)

3. The story that got picked up by the media was slightly off topic - it was about jobs rather than CV's - could this make google think that my site is not relevant?

4. Prior to these stories being picked up - we took a short break from link building for a few months due to resource issues

So if anyone knows if any of these factors are likely to have caused the drop I would be grateful to know!

Thanks

Andrew

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.

I would recommend looking at backlink profile in OSE and ahrefs to see the spam score and difference between number in total links (in ahrefs) and number in links-which-matter (in OSE). This will get you an idea of how spammy/bad your backlink profile is. Also do competitor comparison. This will tell you how far behind you are.

As for DA drop - DA is relative number, if it went down, it doesn't mean anything until you compare with competitor DA changes. If theirs went down the same or more - good for you. Read this on this matter - https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scores

And also do audit and competitor analysis on content. You might think that your content is super awesome, but still, look at what your ranking competitors have, what keywords they are using, how often they are using them and so on.

Hope this helps.

[Fennzil]

Thanks very much Dimitri

Strangely I'm now back on the second page today, although in a slightly lower position than before

Could I pleas just clarify something if you have time to answer one more question...

The majority of my links (and my competitor's links) don't actually show in OSE (even the really good ones - I think maybe because I'm UK) so how would you recommend spotting links that need to be removed? switching to ahrefs and then using the Moz bar on the individual pages maybe? And how bad does a link have to be before you remove/disavow? some look a bit spammy but still have high DA's etc

Or should I maybe just focus on building more content and links than spending time removing bad ones if I haven't actually been notified of any penalties?  Realistically I know I need more content on the site

[DmitriiK]

If you have ahrefs paid subscription, you can download all links, group them by domain. Then you can check those domains in moz's OSE for spam scores. Usually you'd know good domains, cause they are well known (or at least known in your industry). And the amount of the rest should be that large.

But this is what makes the difference:

Realistically I know I need more content on the site

If you think so yourself - that's what's "wrong"

[Fennzil]

Yes - I guess I did know that deep down It's just strange that it dropped like that as I didn't remove any content.. and even stranger that it suddenly moved back up...

Maybe my site is just a bit too thin and that's why it's fluctuating so much at the moment???

Anyway - thanks for your help... I should probably get back to content creation now