Optimized Post Outranked by Other Posts without Backlinks.Please Help!

1. It's a well written 3000+ words by a US native writer.
2. It has about 100+ backlinks from 50+ unique domains. The Domain age is more than 1 year old.
3. The backlinks are mostly from web 2, blog posts and guest posts. I have a backlink from lifehack.org with an exact match anchor text link.
4. The post has DA 19 and PA 18 with Spam score 5. But I have never had spam backlinks. The only black hat backlinks that I've ever built is 600 social bookmarking backlinks. But it was one year ago and 95% of those links are nofollow.
5. It's in a very high competion tech niche. Some of My competitors are pcmag, techradar, cnet and other giant tech websites.
6. It's currently on page #2 of BING but nowhere on google.

1. I have implemented the "tricks" given by the sites. I have added hundreds of backlinks with branded anchor(using press release, blog comment and web2/blogpost).
2. I have disavowed the do follow social bookmarking links.

1. I haven't received any unnatural links or other manual penalty messages in google console. So I can say that the post isn't penalized.
2. I don't know wheter it has a correlation but the post dropped 1-2 days after it got a link from lifehack.
3. The current exact match anchor percentage is 7%.I don't know whether it's already safe or still high.
4. The post has a very low keyword density

cahbagus said:

Hi fellow bloggers..I've been facing this problem for the last 2 months and I still don't know what happened to one of my blog post. I don't know whether the post is penalized or not. And I don't know what cause this problem.

Before I continue, I'm sorry for my poor english. It's not my mother language. But I'm sure you could understand my point.

This is my story. .
I have a post that i have optimized since 6 months ago.

About the post:

1. It's a well written 3000+ words by a US native writer.
2. It has about 100+ backlinks from unique 50+ domains. The Domain age is more than 1 year old.
3. The backlinks are mostly from web 2, blog posts and guest posts. I have a backlink from lifehack.org with an exact match anchor text link.
4. The post has DA 19 and PA 18. Spam score 5. But I have never had spam backlinks. The only black hat backlinks that I've ever built is 600 social bookmarking backlinks. But it was on year ago and 95% of those links are nofollow.
5. It's in a very high competion tech niche. Some of My competitors are pcmag, techradar, cnet and other big companies.
6. It's on #2 of BING but nowhere on google.

It's best position was on page #3. It just stayed on page #3 for 1-2 weeks and after that the post didn't show in the SERP until the last page but it's still well indexed. So, It's not banned
Then, this is the weird thing, another post of my blog(that did'nt get any backlinks) jumped to page #4(from nowhere) for the same keyword.
Another weird thing is, my blog posts that rank for the keyword frequently change(at least 2 times in 2 weeks).
Let's say today url A ranked at page#4 then after a few days url B replaced it at #4. Both Url A and B don't have any backlinks but they have similiar content.

Then I check on majestic the exact match anchor is 12%.
After doing some searches then I concluded that I have over optimized the post.
Then I searched on google, read many blog posts and forums that given tricks to fix this over optimized anchor issue.

And then I have implemented the "tricks" given by the sites. I have added hundreds of backlinks with branded anchor(using press release, blog comment and web2/blogpost).


For your information:

1. I haven't received any unnatural backlinks or other manual penalty in google console. So I can say that the post isn't penalized.
2. I don't know wheter it has a correlation but the post dropped 1-2 days after it got a link from lifehack.
3. The current exact match anchor percentage is 7%.I don't know whether it's already safe or still high.

It has been almost 3 months since the post dropped and it's not recovered yet. I have almost get frustrated because of this problem.

So, Anyone, Would you please help me..? Please give me any advices on what I have to do to fix this issue..?
Thanks guys..Any help would be appreciated.God Bless You..

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validseo said:

If you PM the URL of the post and search term you are targetting I will take a look and give you my thoughts.

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validseo said:

It looks like the primary issue is both pages use the target search terms and the one you don't want to rank is using the exact search term in a heading and the page you want to rank does not. You can see this in the search results as the description Google is showing for the result is pulling the match from that heading. You also need to tune the page for the exact target search term. Google is not going to "figure it out". So if you want to rank for "best red apples" then tune the page for "best red apples".

You are currently #68 in Google. Here is how your content tuning is falling short of page 1 results:



I recommend you investigate you page 1 competitors and see how they get their match counts so high without getting penalties.

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cahbagus said:

Thanks for your help. Do you mean that I have to change the heading with the same keyword on the pages that I don't want to rank?

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iisark said:

Hi cahbagus,

I have reviewed your site/blog post and can say that you are not penalized. You just don't have enough quality backlinks with anchor text. Actually ( accroding to Ahrefs) you have 1 - 2 backlinks where your keywords are mentioned in the anchor. Everything else is generic anchor, naked url's, brand name. I guess you were afraid of G penalty and by this reason you didn't used enough anchor. My advice is to create some quality backlinks with anchor text. You can use 3% - 5% exact anchor and the rest can be variation of the anchor, like: "the best YOUR KEYWORD", "click here to visit YOUR KEYWORD", "YOUR KEYWORD blog post".

Also I found some backlinks from completely unrelated websites (low-quality PBN's for sure) and even from non-english websites.
You need to disavow these links via G disavow tool or you are at very high risk.

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