Overnight Rankings Drop?

[Epicster]

Hello,

So its been like 2 months, my site has dropped from rankings to no-where.

Let me first clear it has nothing to do with AUG 1 update. The rankings dropped happened on JULY 9th when the mobile update came out.

Thinking that was the main culprit i went ahead and completely optimized my pages for mobile and get pagespeed origin speed score to 1 sec. Even when i check results for my keywords, i see no.1 position site has copied my old site design and is ranking above me without even a single backlink ( They might have used PBN but there's no way on terms of backlinks that site can out rank me )

Before the ranking drop i was ranking no.1 positions for all my keywords. At current situation, i am holding only 2 no.1 positions from the past 2 months, while main keywords have lost rankings to no-where.

Does anyone have any idea what happened? I did more backlinks quality ones. The site is not spam at all. NO manual penalty. AMP Implemented. Site is about to reach 1M impressions.

I just need to know what happened in my case so i can fix it.

 

[safeSEOboost]

So if I understand the question (correct me if I am wrong), your site is white hat and well SEO optimized. It ranked and now it does not rank.
In a nutshell is it what you are saying?
And now you want SEO experts to tell you why?
Like a kind of piñata game?
It is a bit like asking why the leaves are falling, reply:
Because it is Autumn.

 

[Epicster]

@safeSEOboost - It's still ranking and on no.1 positions but not all keywords are ranking.

In a simple way - Half keywords are ranking and half are no-where.

I am doing SEO for a long time but that doesnt make me any expert neither you or anyone. Even experts doesn't know what to do against AUG 1 update but thats not the point here.

I am just asking if there is anything i can do to get my other keywords to rank back.

- Keyword optimization
- SPAM
- Speed Optimization
- Algorithms Update
- Backlinks

I have tried everything above but its just those keywords are not coming back.

 

[safeSEOboost]

@safeSEOboostI am doing SEO for a long time but that doesnt make me any expert neither you or anyone

I see: no one is an expert, thanks for breaking the news.
As I had alluded earlier, no one (not even experts from another universe) could answer such question, which was in a nutshell:
half my keywords dropped, I have no idea why, and I will provide no detail, and I expect someone who is not an expert (as no one is) to help.

 

[Epicster]

@safeSEOboost OK thanks, Now stop bashing for no reason. If you don't want to, move on to next thread.

 

[kanamon]

Hello,

So its been like 2 months, my site has dropped from rankings to no-where.

Let me first clear it has nothing to do with AUG 1 update. The rankings dropped happened on JULY 9th when the mobile update came out.

Thinking that was the main culprit i went ahead and completely optimized my pages for mobile and get pagespeed origin speed score to 1 sec. Even when i check results for my keywords, i see no.1 position site has copied my old site design and is ranking above me without even a single backlink ( They might have used PBN but there's no way on terms of backlinks that site can out rank me )

Before the ranking drop i was ranking no.1 positions for all my keywords. At current situation, i am holding only 2 no.1 positions from the past 2 months, while main keywords have lost rankings to no-where.

Does anyone have any idea what happened? I did more backlinks quality ones. The site is not spam at all. NO manual penalty. AMP Implemented. Site is about to reach 1M impressions.

I just need to know what happened in my case so i can fix it.

did you consider the possiblity of you over optimizing the anchors related to the keyowrds that lost ranking ?

 

[safeSEOboost]

@safeSEOboost OK thanks, Now stop bashing for no reason. If you don't want to, move on to next thread.

No bashing lol.

So yes it is somehow weird if you are still ranking for some keywords. As was said ^^ overoptimization could be part of the reason. How is your anchor distribution relative to your lost rankings? How is your anchor distribution broken down in percentage by anchor types?

So the next question could be for how long have you had good rankings before the drop (months, years)? Should we assume you ranked well for less than 1 year, or even less than 6 months? Or did you have these great rankings for a very long time, like many years (I guess not)?

If we knew the niche, age of the site, some ranking table with traffic, this could be helpful. Also we don't know what linking you have done. So quite in the dark with the OP you gave to be honest.

You said you had many #1 rankings, so impressive, 1M impressions, good too. In other words you had done extremely well in a quite competitive market given the traffic. It would be good to know in how much time this was done. If this was achieved in less than 1 year, how did you rank so fast?

 

[Epicster]

@safeSEOboost See thanks for helping me now

So here it is.

- NICHE - Tech, How to's stuff
- Agreed its a new site. The site has got many new keywords which showed up after the rankings drop - 18K organic keywords according to ahrefs. The main issue here is i want some specific keywords to come back to rankings as they generate about 80% of my revenue.
- AGE - The site kicked off in april, so its been 6 months.
- Tons of Authority backlinks brought by me. Still building them.

The problem is only those specific keywords. I do gain rankings for other keywords daily but whats the point when you don't earn shit from them?

So yes it is somehow weird if you are still ranking for some keywords. As was said ^^ overoptimization could be part of the reason. How is your anchor distribution relative to your lost rankings? How is your anchor distribution broken down in percentage by anchor types?

The last part is something that i thinks is the problem. I just do it organically. I don't optimize anything for SEO neither the On-Page nor the OFF.

Let me know If that that is something i am doing it wrong. I need those keywords back badly.

 

[safeSEOboost]

I just do it organically. I don't optimize anything for SEO neither the On-Page nor the OFF.

So my 3 comments are:

1/ I don't think anyone could exactly pinpoint what is going on without auditing the site.

2/ If you do not do any optimization, I do not think this is how you could maximize your income; as you need to optimize to "some degree" so that you rank for the money terms you are targeting; you cannot except to rank for the most profitable keywords just like that, or if you did, maybe there was an element of luck in it, or a temporary effect.

3/ Rankings depend on a number of things, including user behavior; so let's say you rank #40, then google does not have much user behavior data as barely anyone will click on the link; then say at some point you are #1; then google has a lot of user behavior data, and this is when they reassess their calculation; so obviously reaching #1 does not mean you stay there, for the reason just mentioned plus others too.

 

[Epicster]

3/ Rankings depend on a number of things, including user behavior; so let's say you rank #40, then google does not have much user behavior data as barely anyone will click on the link; then say at some point you are #1; then google has a lot of user behavior data, and this is when they reassess their calculation; so obviously reaching #1 does not mean you stay there, for the reason just mentioned plus others too.

I am stil ranking on no.1 positions for the same page which i am talking about but half of the keywords are gone which are important ones.

Whats more funny. let me give an example.

Keyword : Best Vacuum Cleaners - Not Ranking
Keyword : Best Vacuum Cleaner - Ranking on POS 1

Its just an example.

 

[safeSEOboost]

I am stil ranking on no.1 positions for the same page which i am talking about but half of the keywords are gone which are important ones.

Whats more funny. let me give an example.

Keyword : Best Vacuum Cleaners - Not Ranking
Keyword : Best Vacuum Cleaner - Ranking on POS 1

Its just an example.

Are you saying you have a real case singular/plural like that, I assume so. So let's call these keywords kw#1 and kw#999. My next questions are:
- what is the monthly traffic for kw#1 and kw#999?
- what is your keyword density for kw#1 on the corresponding landing page?
- what is your keyword density for kw#999 on the corresponding landing page?
- what is the percentage of anchors with kw#1 as anchor?
- what is the percentage of anchors with kw#999 as anchor?
- do you have site wide links? what is your ratio total backlinks divided by RD?

 

[Epicster]

Are you saying you have a real case singular/plural like that, I assume so. So let's call these keywords kw#1 and kw#999. My next questions are:
- what is the monthly traffic for kw#1 and kw#999?
- what is your keyword density for kw#1 on the corresponding landing page?
- what is your keyword density for kw#999 on the corresponding landing page?
- what is the percentage of anchors with kw#1 as anchor?
- what is the percentage of anchors with kw#999 as anchor?
- do you have site wide links? what is your ratio total backlinks divided by RD?

- Sitewide Links - Nope i do backlinks on particular pages which i want to rank for
- keyword density - 3% for main keyword
- Keyword density somewhere 3-5%
- Anchors are same for keyword ranking and for not ranking. i think its somewhere 10% but links are of quality

One more thing to add. I have a spam competitor who actually cloned my old site design including content. That content was actually spam 100 words or something and he is ranking above me with 0 DA and backlinks according to ahrefs. Might be PBNS but i dont think it can outrank a site with authority backlinks from huge DA sites.