Initial Rankings Placement Issue - What's the Deal?

Alright, I need a bit of assistance here.

Lately, I'm having a peculiar issue with a few of my sites. Before - I could cherry pick low to medium competition longtails, write up a great piece of content for it, smash the publish button, get indexed, and within 24-48 hours be placed on page 2-4 immediately.

The past few weeks, however, my pages are getting indexed, but they aren't getting a good initial ranking at all. In fact, they don't even show up in the top 100.

My question is this - why would this happen all of the sudden? And what can I do to fix it?

And, to clarify this once more so I don't get the typical "you need to build links" replies.... these are very low competition phrases that I typically land on page 2-4 for with ZERO links built - solely on good on-page practices.

Also - there are NO penalties against the sites whatsoever. Older pages are still ranking well. Its only new pages that are now having this issue.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers.

I saw this as well. Low comp search results are filled with unrelated pages from established websites even not trageting the keyword

I'm not seeing irrelevant content popping up for the keywords I'm targeting, but all of the pages listed in the top 20 are at least 3 months old. Some are a few years old. Nevertheless, the content is weaker than what I've posted on my site, my page is better optimized for the targeted phrases, and, based on previous experiences - I SHOULD be landing in the top 20-40 after getting indexed. But that isn't happening now.

It's very odd for that to happen with such low competition terms and my sites are established.

I've noticed the same. I used to rank instantly on page 1 for keywords that only get 100-200 searches a month. Nevertheless, I write in depth content mostly upwards of 2000 words. It's not just for sheer length either, but because I thoroughly explore every cause and target several terms. If you start building links too quickly it appears to delay the rankings even further... I recently wrote an article, changed some older internal links to the new page, and it is ranking fairly well about 10 days later.

This is not typical, but I know what you mean with rankings being extremely slow. Google is taking it a little too far, the results are stale and irrelevant for a lot of searches these days. Just because its an "authority" doesn't mean a mention on some obscure page is relevant.

xplosiv said:

I've noticed the same. I used to rank instantly on page 1 for keywords that only get 100-200 searches a month. Nevertheless, I write in depth content mostly upwards of 2000 words. It's not just for sheer length either, but because I thoroughly explore every cause and target several terms. If you start building links too quickly it appears to delay the rankings even further... I recently wrote an article, changed some older internal links to the new page, and it is ranking fairly well about 10 days later.

This is not typical, but I know what you mean with rankings being extremely slow. Google is taking it a little too far, the results are stale and irrelevant for a lot of searches these days. Just because its an "authority" doesn't mean a mention on some obscure page is relevant.

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This is what I'm experiencing as well.

I do the same when it comes to content. Almost all of my core pieces are 2000-4000 words each and it's not fluff, it's just very detailed and covers all of the aspects of the products in question - a true "buyer's guide", if you will.

Internal linking seems to help, but it doesn't appear to kick in until - like you said - 10+ days. In some cases it doesn't seem to make a difference until 2-3 weeks later.

And, yeah, the search results are definitely taking a hit due to it. I've seen pages that just mention an LSI variation of the keyword I'm targeting popping up in the results and their content is very loosely related and nowhere near as comprehensive as my own.

I guess I'll just have to do more relevant interlinking, wait a couple weeks, and start slowly dripping links to the pages. It is annoying, though. These are keywords I would normally pop up to #8 - #12 for nearly instantly after publishing the article before. SEO has become such a waiting game anymore.