text: Why is the rankings for certain targeted keywords dropping sharply in the past few weeks?
  last edited by
  Excuse me here I can't reveal the website url here due to the confidentiality.
  This website has about 100+pages, and is a wordpress site. Out of 15 targeted keywords, there are few ranked first on Google.co.uk. others are ranked between 3rd and 50+. In the past couple of weeks, we have been submitting to various websites/directories. and 4 main keywords' rankings are improving steadily from 50+ to 20+. We don't buy links, or pay for link exhcanges. We only exchange links on rare occasions.
  1. 2 out of 4 main keywords dropped its rankings from 20+ to 80+ 4 weeks ago over night.
  2. We kept on acquiring links from directories and websites, and 2 weeks after the drop, the rankings of 2 affected keywords had gradually made its way back to 20-30. Just we thought the glitch was over, these 2 keywords has dropped rankings to 50+ once again.
  3. The change of rankings looks too suspicious to us, so we went to use the Moz tool, and discovered the domain authority has also dropped 25% of its value in a month time.
  We never experienced such violent changes in terms of rankings in such a short period of time. My question is: what factors there are to have caused such violent shifts? Why the value of the domain authority is dropped by 25%-30%? What elements affect the domain authority the most?
  last edited by
  Sounds like you're getting hit by panda. How robust is the content on the pages across your site?
  Directories are no longer a recommended method of link building. Without the URL it's hard to make a determination as to why you got hit.
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  I just saw in 'Just discovered' section of MOZ that 2 new backlinks have appeared back to my website - www.isacleanse.com.au from spammy websites which look like they might be associated with inappropriate content. 1. http://laweba.net/opinion-y-tecnologia/css-naked-day/comment-page-53/ peepshow says: (peepshow links off to my site)07/17/2016 at 8:55 pm2. http://omfglol.org/archives/9/comment-page-196 voyeur says: (voyeur linking off to my site)
  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | IsaCleanse
  July 17, 2016 at 7:58 pm Any ideas if this is someone trying to send me negative SEO and best way to deal with it?0 -
  Hi Does page rank and domain authority page rank drop due to duplication issues on a web domain or on a web page? Thanks.
  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEOguy10 -
  In terms of content, this page is blank. Yes, there's a sidebar and footer, but no content. I've seen a page like this rank before. I'm curious if they're implementing something on the back-end I don't realize or if this is just a fluke? Etc. Also, the DA of the site is only a 15, so I don't think that's the reason. http://www.thenurselawyer.com/component/tags/tag/20-pasco-county-personal-injury-lawyers.html Thanks, Ruben
  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup1 -
  Something very strange has happened regarding my website traffic when making a comparison to the first six months of 2012 and then 2014. Anybody got any ideas? From my Google analytics from 1 January 2014 to 1 July in other words six months my total traffic on my website was 30,209. Not provided source ( what does this mean ? ) was very high at 23,141 but two of the my main short tail keywords I've targeted in the past "Whitby holiday cottages “only equal 254 and "Whitby cottages" was only 176. When I made a comparison with the same time period below in 2012 the website traffic this year as gone up greatly by almost 20000, but the two of my money short tail keywords as gone down greatly! If I compare the same time frame for 2012 the overall traffic was only 13,380. Not provided source was nowhere near as high at only 1836 which is also much less than above in 2014 but the short tail keywords I targeted "Whitby holiday cottages was almost 10 times higher at 2005 and "Whitby cottages “much higher at 613. I ran the questionnaire on http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/quiz/ regarding Panda and particularly Penguin and its association with back links. The article says that Penguin didn't hit the overall keywords, but only specific ones if they been targeted on the following dates the time points of April 24, 2012 and May 25, 2012 which are known Penguin rollout dates. So when I checked the two short tail keywords above for those two dates the figures did seem to drop from 10 hits a day to 5 but then went back up immediately to approximately 10 hits a day during the two-month period which suggested to me that I'd not been hit by Penguin on those dates. So when you look at the comparison the first six months of 2012 and then 2014 there is no doubt that money short tail keywords of dropped off dramatically for me but the overall website traffic has gone up dramatically. Some of the increase in traffic will be down to time and more articles/pages etc.
  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WhitbyHolidayCottages
  The two short tail keywords I mention above I know I've dropped in Google rankings I used to be position three page one and the site is now position 10 so I would assume that's why I've dropped in traffic for those phrases.
  Has anybody got any idea what's happened? I can honestly say that I've not noticed it in bookings on the website business seems about the same overall.0 -
  I can't imagine this is a White Hat SEO technique, but they don't seem to be punished for it by Google - yet. How does Google treat the use of your competitors names in your meta keywords/descriptions? Is it a good idea?
  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PeterConnor0 -
  Hi All We launched our client's website http://rollerbannerscheap.co.uk in January this year. We have been building links making sure we are not over optmising anchor text and only following ethical SEO tactics. Our client's site eventually hit page 1 for it's main key word 'Roller Banner' 1 week ago, the site received impressions/clicks from the SERPS and has started to gain traffic from that particular keyword. I have checked today, and I cannot our client's website URL within the first 10 pages of Google, nevermind on page 1. Our client is currently undercutting competitiors on price, which we stated (the price) in the meta tag. Is it possible other SEOs could de-rank our website? If not, what would be a likely explaination for this occurance? Would just like to add, I recently build a link with anchor text 'Roller Banner Website, but one of my older links uses anchor text 'Roller Banners Cheap Website' - They're not exact match, but could this affect our ranking? Awaiting help Lewis
  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SO_UK0 -
  I run a book recommendation site -- Flashlight Worthy. It's a collection of original, topical book lists: "The Best Books for Healthy (Vegetarian) Babies" or "Keystone Mysteries: The Best Mystery Books Set in Pennsylvania" or "5 Books That Helped Me Discover and Love My Italian Heritage". It's been online for 4+ years. Historically, it's been made up of: a single home page ~50 "category" pages, and ~425 "book list" pages. (That 50 number and 425 number both started out much smaller and grew over time but has been around 425 for the last year or so as I've focused my time elsewhere.) On Friday, June 15 we made a pretty big change to the site -- we added a page for every Author who has a book that appears on a list. This took the number of pages in our sitemap from ~500 to 4,149 overnight. If an Author has more than one book on the site, the page shows every book they have on the site, such as this page: http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Roald-Dahl/2805 ..but the vast majority of these author pages have just one book listed, such as this page: http://www.flashlightworthybooks.com/books-by/Barbara-Kilarski/2116 Obviously we did this as an SEO play -- we figured that our content was getting ~1,000 search entries a day for such a wide variety of queries that we may as well create pages that would make natural landing pages for a broader array of queries. And it was working... 5 days after we launched the pages, they had ~100 new searches coming in from Google. (Ok, it peaked at 100 and dropped down to a steady 60 or so day within a few days, but still. And then it trailed off for the last week, dropping lower and lower every day as if they realized it was repurposed content from elsewhere on our site...) Here's the problem: For the last several years the site received ~30,000 search entries a month... a little more than 1,000 a day on weekdays, a little lighter on weekends. This ebbed and flowed a bit as Google made tweaked things (Panda for example), as we garnered fresh inbound links, as the GoodReads behemoth stole some traffic... but by and large, traffic was VERY stable. And then, on Saturday, exactly 3 weeks after we added all these pages, the bottom fell out of our search traffic. Instead of ~1,000 entries a day, we've had ~300 on Saturday and Sunday and it looks like we'll have a similar amount today. And I know this isn't just some Analytics reporting problem as Chartbeat is showing the same drop. As search is ~80% of my traffic I'm VERY eager to solve this problem... So: 1. Do you think the drop is related to my upping my pagecount 8-fold overnight? 2. Do you think I'd climb right back into Google's good graces if I removed all the pages at once? Or just all the pages that only list one author (which would be the vasy majority). 3. Have you ever heard of a situation like this? Where Google "punishes" a site for creating new pages out of existing content? Really, it's useful content -- and these pages are better "answers" for a lot of queries. When someone searches for "Norah Ephron books" it's better they land on a page of ours that pulls together the 4 books we have than taking them to a page that happens to have just one book on it among 5 or 6 others by other authors. What else? Thanks so much, help is very appreciated. Peter
  White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | petestein1
  Flashlight Worthy Book Recommendations
  Recommending books so good, they'll keep you up past your bedtime. 😉0