Ranking dropped by 7 positions for many keywords

[netminds]

Hey,

Since yesterday my ranking dropped by in average 7 positions for most keywords. iIm not 100% sure whats the matter. I rank under the top3 for a quite comptetitive keyword since several months. During the last 4 weeks it wasn't that stady (between 2 - 4) because the competition is using an aggressiv link building method.
I'm adding constantly new content and the link building is also quite natural. Maybe I linked the same sites from some of my blogs too often... and Google may see it as a "link network". I experience the same for two of those sites. Maybe I should remove those links?

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

[RyanKent]

If you dropped 1-2 positions then it can be your competition improving their sites.

If you dropped 30+ positions I would suspect your site is under a penalty.

Dropping 7 positions leads me to first look at your site's links. There is a strong chance some important links to your site have been devalued. This could be due to reasons unrelated to your site, such as the source has been penalized. It could also be for reasons related to your site. I would suggest a careful examination of your links.

[netminds]

Thanks Ryan. However, other sites which are also linked from some of those blogs are still ranking as before... Would you just continue with link building and adding content as before (of course keeping the sites separated) or would you also remove some links? A few weeks ago I even got a backlink from bbc.co.uk...

[danrawk]

Hey Netminds,

did you update any code for the page(s) on that keyword? sometimes google will knock you down, and then after a spider cache or two it will return to normal (assuming no massive difference).

hope it returns! :>)

[MauroMazzocchini]

Hi Netminds,

I'd check if any changes have been made to the internal link structure of your website. Is it blog (Wordpress) based?

[netminds]

Hey,

Yes, the main site is on Wordpress, but I added an aditional blog to the site on which we post new articles every week. We also have a forum with around 2k posts. I only added an image to the front page and linked from the blog to one of the pages from the main site.
The strange thing is that it also happened to two other domains for which I placed links...

Do you think google recognized it as a "link network" and therefor the ranking drop?

[BrettKrasnove]

I've seen similar drops for my site as well. Many different categories where we used to rank 1,2 we are now in the 6,7,8 range. I do see lots of keyword domain referral sites popping back up. I'm assuming its another tweak.

[netminds]

Actually we dont have any keyword domains. The guys who are ranking now on 2,3 etc. are doing so with one page of relevant content but 100s of keyword backlinks.

Maybe I will remove a few of the links on blogs from which I link to those other two sites as well.

Justin, are you continuing linkbuilding + adding new content from time to time or do you change anything else on your sites?

[BrettKrasnove]

We have a fully staffed editorial team. We update content constantly. I have seen a resurgence of newer spammy referral sites pop up as well as some other rather bizarre results. Query best strollers in google. You should see Conde Nast's homepage as the 5th result which is completely irrelevant.

Check out this other users comment on this URL http://forums.ebay.com/db2/topic/Ebay-Partner-Network/Googles-Algo-Panda/5100011135

I believe this to be an algo tweak/update,.

[netminds]

Lets hope the good results return.

[dmac]

This happened to me, almost all of my keywords dropped several pages all at once. It took a lot of digging, but I found out what was causing it, at least in my case.

I had been ignoring some pretty obvious crawl errors for a few weeks. After my keywords got dropped, I decided it might be a good time to go fix the crawl errors. Within a day of fixing them, my keywords reappeared and crawled back up to their original positions within a few days.

Again, not saying this is your problem, but it's pretty obvious to me that Google doesn't like crawl errors.

[MauroMazzocchini]

Ok, if any new content has been added to the main website I'd check if the linking structure has changed too. That means, for example, to check out if before you were linking the ranking pages from the index page or side wide and now, with the new content added, those links have gone or shifted to secondary locations.

While for the "link network" you should work also on gaining inbound links from other C-blocks so that you diversify and certainly acquire more trust.

[netminds]

I just read that other people have the same prob. Since Tuesday their rankings dropped as well. Could it still be Panda? I noticed that our content gets copied quite often. Alone one paragraph on the front page can be found over 1300 times on Google.com. Could that be an issue? But Google should acutally recognize which site published the content first...

[KeriMorgret]

It's been a month or so since this was posted. Do you have any updates? Have your rankings changed? Did you figure out what might have happened? Anything for us to learn from or clues to try to help you more would be great.