Over Optimized for a Keyword?

Hi Guys

I have a site which was number 1 and 2 of Google for 18 months for my main keywords. Recently, it tanked to 7,8,or 9 depending on the day.

My links are over 2000, built evenly over time across ********, nofollow, lots of different anchor texts, deep links and home page links, limited directory links, mainly blog posts on wordpress and joomla networks, video sites, yahoo answers, blog comments, article submissions, and more.

All designed to appear natural over time. I have been adding keyword loaded (clever with keyword variations - not stuffing) pages for longer tail and rank on Google number 1-5 on almost all of it. My page views increase weekly from day one. However, my number one phrase has dropped big time. Just that ONE PHRASE.

I have social bookmarking at a slow burn, nothing aggressive.

My guess is over optimization compared with competitors, or not enough url links (too much anchor links is not natural). Do you guys agree?

I am trying more social bookmarks spread over IP's, timezones, accounts, different text, etc, and am also building "Click here" and "URL" anchor links to make it seem more natural.

I have 3 other sites on 1st page too, built with same strategy but much less of it. They are not affected.

Any advice would be appreciated.

(I am a 9 year online marketer - 3 years SEO focus, full time 100% online income, so my level of knowledge is high - in order for you to pitch your response at the right level.)

Hrm..

Just wondering, did you check the backlinks and other stats for those 8-10 sites that are now outranking you? Maybe it's a competitive keyword and they have been linkbuilding around it, and finally pushed you out. However with so many position drops at once...it's unlikely that 8-10 sites are suddenly out-SEOing you.

Do you still have the same # of and quality backlinks for that keyword? That might be the culprit, maybe if you lost 1-2 of your highest PR backlinks for that term. Or if their link power got diluted by too many links or dinged by GOOG.

I have 0 knowledge about keyword density penalties, but if it turns out to be a keyword-density penalty I'm very interested to know the outcome. Thanks

oh also, can you post the keyword density % for the keyword in question? I believe there are tools that will calculate this for you; the seoquake extension does it but there's probably a website that'll do it too w/o installing extensions.

bornlucid said:

, or not enough url links (too much anchor links is not natural).

Click to expand...

By that, do you mean too many links to your domain (www.yoursite.com) and not enough links to pages within your site (www.yoursite.com/page.html)?

bornlucid said:

Hi Guys

I have a site which was number 1 and 2 of Google for 18 months for my main keywords. Recently, it tanked to 7,8,or 9 depending on the day.

My links are over 2000, built evenly over time across ********, nofollow, lots of different anchor texts, deep links and home page links, limited directory links, mainly blog posts on wordpress and joomla networks, video sites, yahoo answers, blog comments, article submissions, and more.

All designed to appear natural over time. I have been adding keyword loaded (clever with keyword variations - not stuffing) pages for longer tail and rank on Google number 1-5 on almost all of it. My page views increase weekly from day one. However, my number one phrase has dropped big time. Just that ONE PHRASE.

I have social bookmarking at a slow burn, nothing aggressive.

My guess is over optimization compared with competitors, or not enough url links (too much anchor links is not natural). Do you guys agree?

I am trying more social bookmarks spread over IP's, timezones, accounts, different text, etc, and am also building "Click here" and "URL" anchor links to make it seem more natural.

I have 3 other sites on 1st page too, built with same strategy but much less of it. They are not affected.

Any advice would be appreciated.

(I am a 9 year online marketer - 3 years SEO focus, full time 100% online income, so my level of knowledge is high - in order for you to pitch your response at the right level.)

Click to expand...

can i be your apprentice? id love to learn from the best like you. hell ill even do some of your work for you.

This may be stating the obvious for you but all the links you have built from are where anyone else can gain from (i.e not very high value). Do you have high pr "PAGE" links as well from quality sources?

Maybe that would be the edge your competitor's have? Have you looked at the other sites and seen anything different to yours?

I am sure you also know the key word density percentage is "aparently" around 5% max - according to most sources, how accurate that is I dont know but maybe your pricking googles spam filter as you say?

Hi Guys - to update all the questions, I have tried to answer all at once.

I looked at my top 2 competitors, and my site has 800+ home page links and 2200 to the domain al together... The other 2 have (44 and 58) and (242 and 430) so many less... Top is PR2, 2nd is PR3. My site strangely has PR2 homepage and PR3 inner pages. In my experience PR is only a small part of the game, so that didn't concern me.

My density is 5.16%... theirs are 5.02 and 3.16.

The only thing that changed from before was that my SEO plugin had messed up and lost my metatags on my home page for a few weeks without me spotting it. I fixed it and my site tanked. So a couple of days later I broke it back again and the pages that ranked after were different pages. If I could get Google to put the original ones back again I would.

So, I'm not sure if I should build more links - even though I dwarf their sites, fix the metatags to break it again! or just sacrifice that one keyword because I get all the rest?

Maybe I lost some High PR links, so I can bump up a few...

I haven't build many links to http://www.mysite.com or http://www.mysite.com - they are mainly keyword anchor text... so that could be a factor, but my gut instinct is that it was the title tag change or a few links dropping or both. I read that you should gun for up to 20% "normal links" like url or "click here".

Thanks for the input. As for taking on an apprentice, I'll give it some thought... I have 4 full time staff, but I am recruiting - so maybe getting some help in return for some training is a way forward - worse case scenario I can write out what is working for me. I'll hit $850,000 in annual revenue this year (my year end is Feb) from $43,000 of adwords and everything else I do online is free. SEO, video submission and maybe a quarter from my affiliates. But all sales are physical product, so I hold quite a lot of stock. Big sales means big cash tied up in stock, so it's not all glamour.

But this SEO issue feels like a slap. I thought I was a master of my trade (on a small scale) but now I feel like I'm still guessing.

Fortunately, several of the sites ahead of my main site are the secondaries I set up to mop up the first page. They convert lower, but they are still mine. End of ramble

Oh - I forgot. My Google.com rankings are still number one - it is my UK listings on Google.co.uk that have fallen. I have a .com site on US servers, and my competitors are .co.uk and .de so I wonder if it is some sort of UK or European filter?!

Welcome to the dynamic world of SEO.

even some argue that keyword density is sooo '03, I still believe in on-site optimization, interlinking the pages, H1, bold,italic, footers, all that stuff. I think over 5% might be high, especially if u use long tail keywords and semantic phrases, SE will brake keywords also into single words not just the long tail ones.
Spreading in links to index and other pages is also important.
Having a real contact us page with contact info and physical address seems to picking importance to some major SEs.

If you market is localized try to get relevant links from that area and related niche.
Create localized versions of product pages for your visitors.


For what its worth - if you make changes I would suggest trying new pages or at least keeping copy of current.

besides that, IMO it is easier to get the ranking but keeping it is the harder part.

as always that is my opinion and experience and I am sure there are many schools of thought on this topic.

Good luck

you do a very good job
congratulations!