What does it mean when wrong pages are ranking

I just got cut of 60-80% of my traffic my all sites combined yesterday. Almost all my sites dropped about 40-70 places. Few of my sites did not get hit at all, still ranking well. I have 5 different hosting accounts and doing some relevant (but not excessive IMO) crosslinking/reciprocal linking - but I am doing exactly same with those sites that are still ranking #1 - so are my competitors = don't think crosslinking is a problem here?

Rankings for many sites that dropped are really weird and don't know what to think of. I have been trying to figure out last few days what causes wrong pages to rank for wrong keywords, but haven't found any plausible reason. I've seen some of you having the same problems, do you have noticed any pattern or reasons why this is happening? Is it some kind of penalty, something wrong with your site or something else?

Here are results from some of my sites:

search for brand/domain (without spaces, in some cases might be a keyword)
BEFORE - AFTER
Site1 | 1. - 46. (Contact page)
Site2 | 1. - 41. (Contact page)
Site3 | 1. - 49. (Main page)
Site4 | 1. - 76. (Main page)
Site5 | 1. - 56. (Main page)

Other keywords/searches follow the same pattern. I have done some link building to these sites, but not much, some WEB2.0 with unique content, some blog networks from here (only 10's of links / site), very little relevant and manual blog commenting and forums and some retweets/facebook stuff.

Do you think this is caused by penguin/algo, my crosslinking (remember that I have sites still ranking with same crosslinking system) or maybe blog network from here (this is something I'm thinking of, bought only 10 links/site, but all the sites that got link from this network dropped - could only 10 links do this?) or is this something else?

it is because google penguin update wich was a totally failure

Compare the backlinks and anchor text diversity for both URLs. Your money URL and the URL you didn't want ranking.

My guess is you have backlinks to your money URL with little to no anchor text variation and no back links to the URLs you didn't intend to rank. Use MajesticSEO and compare their new metrics, citation vs. trust flow.

i'm seeing the same issue in my serps...don't really know what to think of it...

recently, some of serps started showing the correct pages, but the majority of them are like this...

Em][n3m;4255780 said:

it is because google penguin update wich was a totally failure

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Initial penguin update was 24th which hit some of my other sites, but these that dropped yesterday wasn't affected until now. Google haven't confirmed any new updates in last few days so not sure if this is correct.

Mortz said:

Compare the backlinks and anchor text diversity for both URLs. Your money URL and the URL you didn't want ranking.

My guess is you have backlinks to your money URL with little to no anchor text variation and no back links to the URLs you didn't intend to rank. Use MajesticSEO and compare their new metrics, citation vs. trust flow.

Click to expand...

I have done this allready and divided all the anchors in groups. There are still some things I want to fix (using more nested keywords), but for example URL/main keyword ratio is very healthy in most cases. With site 1 I have used over 300 keywords for tier 3 and tier 2, and about 5-10 main keywords, URL's, random stuff, images and about 30 different related keywords for tier 1. Site 2 I don't have that detailed backlink profile, just few main keywords, lots of URL's and then some random stuff + long tails. But it's correct, I don't have any backlinks for those contact pages that are ranking.

manny521 said:

i'm seeing the same issue in my serps...don't really know what to think of it...

recently, some of serps started showing the correct pages, but the majority of them are like this...

Click to expand...

I've seen you talking about the same issue and was kind of hoping you'd chime in and safe the day But it seems you have not figured this out yet, hopefully one of us will soon - this is starting to be very frustrating...

domainmadness said:

I have done this allready and divided all the anchors in groups. There are still some things I want to fix (using more nested keywords), but for example URL/main keyword ratio is very healthy in most cases. With site 1 I have used over 300 keywords for tier 3 and tier 2, and about 5-10 main keywords, URL's, random stuff, images and about 30 different related keywords for tier 1. Site 2 I don't have that detailed backlink profile, just few main keywords, lots of URL's and then some random stuff + long tails. But it's correct, I don't have any backlinks for those contact pages that are ranking.

Click to expand...

How's your on site SEO for those pages? It's probably all natural since you didn't intend to rank those pages. The answer is one of two things, unnatural back linking or unnatural on-site SEO for the new ranking pages.

Since Penguin will be a sweeping algo, I'm sure new people will be hit every time it passes. You might have escaped at first but perhaps your best back links lost value and it ended up hurting your site as well.

Mortz said:

How's your on site SEO for those pages? It's probably all natural since you didn't intend to rank those pages. The answer is one of two things, unnatural back linking or unnatural on-site SEO for the new ranking pages.

Since Penguin will be a sweeping algo, I'm sure new people will be hit every time it passes. You might have escaped at first but perhaps your best back links lost value and it ended up hurting your site as well.

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On site SEO on contact pages are non-existent, after all those are just contact pages with contact form, nothing else.

You might be right about Penguin sweep, still just puzzled why my other sites didn't get a hit. Also, if you are right, I'm a bit confused what kind of links caused this and why all the site lost dropped about same amount. I can't seem to find any pattern in my linking that would have caused this, I don't even have that much backlinks to any of these sites and most of those are good quality.

domainmadness said:

On site SEO on contact pages are non-existent, after all those are just contact pages with contact form, nothing else.

You might be right about Penguin sweep, still just puzzled why my other sites didn't get a hit. Also, if you are right, I'm a bit confused what kind of links caused this and why all the site lost dropped about same amount. I can't seem to find any pattern in my linking that would have caused this, I don't even have that much backlinks to any of these sites and most of those are good quality.

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See the other thread I just wrote regarding MajesticSEO. Plug in the URLs you want to test and put your Citation / Flow numbers into this thread for a handful of the good ranking and poorly ranking URLs.

One thing I also noticed.

Site 1. When searching for very unique phrase I kind of invented for this niche "my keyword blaa of blaa", I get only 3 pages of results. Last on page 3 is a product page from site 1 and then I can find my domain (which should appear for this keyword) from omitted results...

domainmadness said:

One thing I also noticed.

Site 1. When searching for very unique phrase I kind of invented for this niche "my keyword blaa of blaa", I get only 3 pages of results. Last on page 3 is a product page from site 1 and then I can find my domain (which should appear for this keyword) from omitted results...

Click to expand...

Duplicate content issue?

Mortz said:

See the other thread I just wrote regarding MajesticSEO. Plug in the URLs you want to test and put your Citation / Flow numbers into this thread for a handful of the good ranking and poorly ranking URLs.

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Site 1 domain name top rankings
1st - Affiliate site EMD ---> No backlinks
2nd - Other page from 1st
3rd - WEB2.0 ---> C 17 | T 6
4th - Some random forum ---> no backlinks
5th - Lol just noticed, some WEB2.0 I created over 8 months ago when I was starting, very poor content that is just translated from english 400 words, link to my site (I have foreign sites) ---> C 2 | T 3
6th - Affiliate site close to EMD ---> C22 | T23
7th - Affiliate site close to EMD with 2 BL ---> C2 | T-
8th - Affiliate sites root domain which redirects to their domain.com/keyword, domain ---> C24 | T16, page ---> C27 | T24
9th - 2 years old affiliate site which has long with blank page and few expired affiliate links in footer - no backlinks
10th - Affiliate site, no backlinks

My site: C43 | T18

I can see a huge gap there, but still those results doesn't make any sense to me. I'll analyse other of my sites in a minute.

Mortz said:

Duplicate content issue?

Click to expand...

No duplicate content.

Site 2.

Main keyword competition:

1st - Authority site ---> C32 | T22
2nd - Blogspot affiliate site ----> C25 | T8
3rd - EMD affiliate site ----> C18 | T23
4th - Affiliate site ----> C20 | T12
5th - Authority site ----> C31 | T17
6th - 1 hour ago indexed news about this niche from huge authority news site ----> no backlinks to page, domain ----> C60 | T54
7th - Authority site C25 | T22
8th - Affiliate site ----> C28 | T23
9th - Authority site C32 | T22
10th - Affiliate site C31 | T14

My site: C21 | T13

domainmadness said:

Site 1 domain name top rankings
1st - Affiliate site EMD ---> No backlinks
2nd - Other page from 1st
3rd - WEB2.0 ---> C 17 | T 6
4th - Some random forum ---> no backlinks
5th - Lol just noticed, some WEB2.0 I created over 8 months ago when I was starting, very poor content that is just translated from english 400 words, link to my site (I have foreign sites) ---> C 2 | T 3
6th - Affiliate site close to EMD ---> C22 | T23
7th - Affiliate site close to EMD with 2 BL ---> C2 | T-
8th - Affiliate sites root domain which redirects to their domain.com/keyword, domain ---> C24 | T16, page ---> C27 | T24
9th - 2 years old affiliate site which has long with blank page and few expired affiliate links in footer - no backlinks
10th - Affiliate site, no backlinks

My site: C43 | T18

I can see a huge gap there, but still those results doesn't make any sense to me. I'll analyse other of my sites in a minute.

Click to expand...

Thanks for providing this data. #1 and #2 obviously does well because of the EMD. #3 is interesting, take a look at it's top back links assuming it has BLs and check the Citaiton/Trust flow of them. Optimize and properly monetize your #5 spot! lol.

#6 has a linking pattern that's working really well for it, I would research it's back links and see if you can target a similar backlinking structure. #8 has a better linking structure as well (the redirected URL doesn't matter much here but the fact the URL has the good metric does). #9 is tough to read unless the domain age is helping it or the onsite content is some how considered valuable.

#4, #7 & #10 are probably doing well in that niche simply because they don't have bad backlinks. Onsite SEO is probably decent and the content is relevant, that's just a hunch though.

Just went trough #6 backlinks and their backlink profile is awful... about 3300 links, about 100 linking domains. 3000 links are from blogroll and is exact keyword. Then the better quality backlinks are either some of this guys crosslinking or some private blogs (just few links) that he has. He is also linking to all his (probably his, who knows) from every blog. This guy was ranking pretty well in my niche before penguin, but most of his sites are gone now. Rest of the links are spammed to death blog comments from chinese sites and crappy profile links. Anchors are not very diverse either. Don't know what to think of.

Other one (#8) has only few links, but anchors are clever and somewhat divers. Most of his links comes from his own sites. Nothing too special here.

Thanks a lot for trying to help, but can't find anything that could help me to figure out what is wrong. Not sure if I should ask removal of those blog network links I recently got for these sites that dropped...

Maybe wrong seo?

I had this exact problem,

Home page WOULD NOT rank, even when I added the ranking pages to the robots.txt as no-index. New inner pages ranked (worse). Eventually, after no-indexing the whole site (aside from the home page), the site stopped ranking completely.

I'm not affiliated with these guys at all, but a Vitamin D service from the BST fixed it, and got me back to ranking at #1 (55k exact).

Blame google for this.

For one of the SERPS I'm targeting, I was at #1 but now at #11. The dude in #1 has the first 3 stops one for the home page, one for the post targeting the keyword, and one for his contact us. Little bit of an overkill here Google?

These serps are poor but until G gets a grip it's what we have to deal with.
It looks like they are ranking sites like bing,they want some trust first before you get the rankings.This ties in with inner pages showing in serps but not homepage it's like the G dance but constant.

Maybe the contact page is ranking the best since other pages within the site have artificial links built to them which Google has detected?