NEED HELP, Figuring Out Ranking Drop!

[rrsmondo]

I had the same thing happen to a few of my keywords.

[MyNet]

Any suggestions on what to do, or advice from what you did?

[rrsmondo]

I kept adding new links and in time I recovered. I varied the links anchors to bring the direct to non direct ratio closer to 20%.

[MyNet]

What do you think caused your problems in ranking?

[polarking]

Are you also wildblue.com? That site ranked in first when wild blue is search

[MyNet]

No, wildblue.com is owned by another company.

[AndyMacLean]

Ive just this minuted posted a discussion about Google hurting aggregators on this very forum http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-google-making-life-harder-for-aggregators.

I think you may be seeing ranking drop for a branded term as I believe Google is working on reducing sites optimised for branded terms when they arent the brand owner.

[MyNet]

Well, I thought about that too.  However, many of the people that jumped ahead of us are not the brand owner either, nor are they in my opinion as relevant to the subject as we are.

[EGOL]

I think that is a good conclusion.

[MyNet]

Why do you think other non-brand owners, would replace us?  Looking at it from Google’s perspective it seems as if it would be counter intuitive to replace one website in the rankings with another one just like it.

[MarieHaynes]

There are a few things that stand out to me when looking at your site.  First of all, you don't have the words "Wild Blue" in your homepage title, so if you are trying to rank your home page for this term that would help.  I do see it on your inner pages, but do you have links built to the inner pages?

Your linking profile looks very unnatural, especially when you rank it by anchor text.  However, if your drop happened in February of 2012, it wasn't because of Penguin because that didn't happen till April.  Have you checked your webmaster tools for unnatural links warnings?  This could be the cause.  You've got a lot of anchor texted links as top anchors.  A natural profile would have your url and brand as the most popular anchors.

When you were ranking for "wild blue", how new was your site?  You may have gotten a honeymoon boost and then dropped down a few weeks or months later.  However, it is a little strange...I don't see you in the first 8 pages for that term.  I would expect at least one of your inner pages to rank...but again, if it's a competitive field and you've got no links to inner pages (I didn't check...just assuming), and don't have the keyword in your title then this could just be normal and not due to a penalty at all.

[MyNet]

I appreciate your help.  When our site was ranking for that term it was about 5 years old.  We have ranked extremely well for that term for the entire existence of our site, with the exception of after February.  This drop actually occurred even before Panda was released (about two weeks before I think).  I did get one of the unnatural linkings Alerts In July (well after the drop occurred).  However, I did a lot of research on it, and my conclusion was unless you got one of the warning messages related to unnatural linking don’t worry about it, as the site has not actually been penalized.  From my understanding this message was more or less a “change what you are doing before it gets worse” type of message.  Frustratingly we have never engaged in shady practices.

The only thing we have done that people now say has no effect is article marketing.  Last year, we did invest some resources in creating some very high quality articles and submitting them to a few different directories.  These were very informative and useful, and not the least bit spammy.  Once Panda came out we stopped.  To further complicate things, we didn’t focus any of these article efforts on the “WildBlue” keyword.  Prior to Feb. we didn’t have to do much work for this keyword because we naturally ranked so well.

We actually use to have that keyword in our title, but took it out just a bit ago because we were not gaining any traction, and thought it best to reinvest that space with another keyword.  The most puzzling thing for me about this situation, is that I understand gradually dropping for a specific keyword due to several factors.  However, being completely dropped from the rankings in one week from a keyword that your entire website is designed to represent is still very puzzling to me.

[MarieHaynes]

Is it possible that "Wild Blue" is a trademarked term?  Just a thought, but I wonder if you could have been taken out of the index because of a DMCA takedown request?

Did you do anything else during the time period preceding the drop?  Like change url structures, change hosting, etc.?

[MyNet]

Well, we didn’t change URL structures or hosting or anything.  However, Wild Blue is a trademarked term.  However, we have permission from WildBlue to use the term for marketing purposes.  This leads me to the same puzzler, which is that so many other sites similar to ours (many of the them much less relevant) replaced us in the rankings.  I have tried for several months to figure this out.  I hate to give up as this is so pertinent to the very core function our site and the information we provide, but I just don’t know what else to do.  I even submitted a reconsideration request to Google.  I haven’t heard back from them yet.

[bele]

Trademarks can be registered in some countries, but not worldwide. Will it be any difference in selected country search if trademark is not valid there?

As i see in some results, google just hides the result if that page had official trademark violation, but does not penalize the website.