Sudden SERP stop for main keyword.

[VictorVC]

Hey guys,

I have a website with about 30 Google indexed pages. Most of my pages are perfoming well for my keywords. My homepage recently started doing extremely well. Number 4 overall for a highly competitive keyword/niche. Then after a week it dropped completely off the map. It still shows for secondary and tertiary keywords. But my primary keyword does not rank anywhere. I checked as deep as 50 pages. It's been 3 weeks now. Any ideas of what might have happened? Is there really a sandbox? Could I maybe have been Panda slapped? Or do you think it is more likely just a technical/SEO issue. It just seems odd that it jumped so high and then disappeared??

[MoosaHemani]

Ok, I genuinely doubt that only a week ago you keyword started to rank extremely well… and then dropped from the listings but it showers for secondary terms… did you make links from paid blog networks or spammy sites? If yes then you must build some more quality links targeting your main keyword.

Or you should also try making some changes within the content and on-page factors and see if it works for you… there can be lot of possibilities as this requires complete Audit of the website.

[VictorVC]

No spammy sites. Mainly article submissions and submitted it to alot of directories focusing primarily on the one word keyword. Could it be a lack of diverse anchor texts?

[MoosaHemani]

To be honest Diverse Anchor Text is always recommended but this can’t take you that down that it didn’t appear anywhere against a search term… there must be some other reason for it. I would suggest you to make some changes on content and recheck the on-page elements to see if there is anything missing.

Make the changes and wait for the next crawl… Also double check the GWT if it shows any error!

[VictorVC]

two other possibilities. gwt says severe site health issue. robot.txt is blocking some important page. but is a .js file that website tonight claims is standard protocol and that it is just an image file. secondly i foolishly renamed my homepage and it caused a duplicate content issue. go daddyl/website tonight won't allow me to use a 301 redirect. but those wouldnt only happen to one particular keyword.