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HI,  it may have showed 16% for you because you may have been using the wrong business name. We are Fat Eyes on Yelp, but also appear sometimes as Fat Eyes Web Development and maybe occasionally Fat Eyes Web Design on some of the others. I loved that you pointed me to getlisted.org. Very helpful! While we have listings on many, I hadn't "claimed" our business on all of them and will follow-through with getting listed on the others.

Nope, sadly, no positive changes. This only just happened on Saturday, the 29th. We are now  below the top 50 for our 3 most targeted keywords after being # 7. We'd been #3 for years, had a drop to #15 in October and I'd brought it back up to #7 with a lot of on-page work. I was getting 'A' report cards from SEOMoz. Sigh.

The really sad thing is that we are a good company, with an outstanding local reputation, tons of local high profile clients who love us, very high integrity.........SIGH.

Hello again,

Thank You to those who took the time to respond to my query. You've offered really great information and I've learned quite a bit.

I am still looking for the cause of this literally overnight drop for my most important keywords and would like opinions as to whether you think the following, is correct:

The conclusion I am reaching is that it is possible that our on-page SEO is no longer having a positive effect (or any effect) on our targeted keywords. Could this really happen overnight?

If this is the case, other than the obvious long-term SEO strategy refocus,  the only short-term remedy I can think of is to go back and re-word the anchor text of our existing links to contain the keyword phrases we want to re-target on whatever sites we are able to. The majority of our links are coming from client sites, so while tedious, this should be doable.

Having been #3-4 on Google for 14 years, and a great local reputation, it's a sad situation.

Thanks again for any assistance on this!

Thank you for taking a look and passing on the information. I just tested it myself and got a listing score of 60%.

We do have a Google Business listing for Fat Eyes Web Development.

Our Yelp  account is 'Fat Eyes' and the link: http://www.yelp.com/biz/fat-eyes-santa-barbara.

According to our 12/24 SEOMoz report, we were ranking 5 on Bing and Yahoo for "web design Santa Barbara" and 10 on each Bing and Yahoo for "Santa Barbara web design".
Thanks for the tip to "claim" the business listing.

And yes, I agree about the blog. We are currently stockpiling articles and will be adding the blog in the near future.

Thanks again!

Thank you for taking the time to outline this for me. I have to say I am very reluctant to follow this particular advice for a number of reasons. It did spark a couple ideas for me though, and I'm grateful for that.

Meanwhile, I'm watching Whiteboard Friday (thanks for the recommend) and hope to actually be able to understand. I confess to feeling very much on shaky ground for much of this. A lot of it is outside my knowledge base and expertise.

If anyone out there has any other thoughts on why this occurred, I would really appreciate it. The mystery is maddening.

Thank you so much! Our site is http://www.fateyes.com

#1 My title length is too long and I am aware of that but didn't think it mattered much as some of my competitors sites also have long titles and are ranking higher than we are.

#2 Our company name is still ranking #1 from what I can see- unless I don't understand your point.

#3 & 4 - I checked on WMT and no messages....

Our Google position had a sudden and precipitous drop from #3 to #15 in October for our two main keywords: "web design Santa Barbara" and "Santa Barbara web design".

I have steadily gotten it back to #7 by putting a lot of effort to our on-page SEO.

As of my December 24 SEOMoz report, it was #7, and as of my check yesterday, Dec. 28 it was #7. We were #3 for "web designers Santa Barbara" as of yesterday.

Today, i cannot even find our listing on the first 5 pages.

Recently, our partner company was engaging in some link building for us that may have just occurred and I'm worried that this may be the cause. I have not yet had a report and actually don't know for sure yet, it has even been accomplished.

We had also done some link building in October by a different company we subcontract to and there was a Google type hack of our site. Those were the two major changes that occurred at that time.

I thought it would be safe to have some more link building done now, since we'd already survived that first "sudden" increase of links in October.

Does anyone have any idea what may have happened and how I can fix this? I am trying not to panic.

Thank you in advance for any ideas to understand and/or remedy the situation!

Yes. Exactly. Yesterday, my ranking report dated 12/11/12 said PR 8 but I saw myself in position #11.

Today, 12/12/12, the page rank in the report has changed and is matching what I see when I search. It's #11 and my search is #11. The report on 12/11/12 says PR 8, today the report number has gone up to 11. I didn't realized that  there could be a lag time or that reports might change during the week. I thought the report was the report for its particular week and that to see updated info, one would have to wait for the next week for a new report. Has anyone else experienced this?

Thanks, Jamo.

I am not logged into Google when I search.

The key word is "web design Santa Barbara'

Interesting that there is no correlation because prior to this week's report the two were identical: PR # and our placement on Google, so I assumed it was one and the same.

For years, our company placed 3 or 4 in an organic search on Google for the keyword I am inquiring about. A couple of months ago, we went down to number 15.

I then subscribed to SEOMOZ and began a concerted effort to improve our ranking for this keyword.

Slowly, our listing came up higher in searches and on our reports- back onto the first page #8. Our weekly SEOMOZ reports reflected this improvement, but then it dropped down again to page 2, #11.

My most recent report, this week, gave us a PR 8 for this keyword, but our listing is showing upon page 2, #11.

I do have my personal search and browser history disabled. I am unclear as to why there is this discrepancy.