Hello BHW, I have a good solid old domain with a good PA/DA and other metrics, on top of that I run a site on this domain for a year and never had any problems. I built max 30-50 links to my pages. I have 2 pages that are ranked top 3 for a good keywords that brings me like 70-80% of traffic for 6-7 months. But recently when I search for this keywords I see that my site has lost the previous position on google and I can only find my index site ranking for that keywords instead targeted inner page. http://domain.com/ - without inner page that it used to be on googles front page. I experienced the same problem before with over-optimization. But, this is something different. Any thoughts? Btw. I checked google WMT and I don't have any messages.
I'm having exactly the same problem on one of my sites. 1 week ago I had this problem on another site, but it regained the rankings after 1 week~, hope this one will regain also. It could be because of anchor text is not diversified enough, talking about the website which regained the rankings, I've sent some brand and random anchor links, but can't know for sure if that was the problem in the first place.
If there is no message in WMT, then you have no manual action. You are likely ranking where you should be all factors considered. Any type of link building puts you at risk for Penguin. If you play that game, you should consider the risk. Real link building is expensive, so anything you buy that's cheap and automated is likely to get you caught sooner or later.
I haven't had a single site penalized, but aren't there cases where they don't send the message even if the site is indeed penalized ?
Same thing happened to 1 of my sites yesterday. Some of the inner page that was ranking KWs on page 1 and 2 has disappeared and replaced by the homepage (which is not optimised for that KW) but at a much higher position. Some URLs ranking had no links built to them have disappeared and replaced by homepage while some pages with links are still ranking thesame so its random with about 50% of my URLs affected. Homepage still no.1 for its main kw. Basically instead of mysite.com/blue-widget ranking page 1 and 2, now its mysite.com ranking page 8 or 9 for thesame kWs. Hope it comes back after a week as did for the other poster. No messages in WMT.
Normally i'd say that's coincidence, but when 3 people are having similar problems, perhaps that's some sore of google update
3 people of 79 who viewed this thread, out of which probably less than 20% have money sites + do SEO + track their rankings...
I can think of 2 scenarios where this would happen: 1. Your page is also featured on the homepage, and ends up being more informative on the subject having that content AND everything else around it (if a wp blog has it as one of the latest posts) 2. Your inner page is slapped (page wide, not sitewide) and the next related thing from your domain is being ranked (homepage)
Point 1 is incorrect as not all urls affected are on homepage but many are. Point 2 is incorrect cause its about 50% of Kws and 50% of links. EG, mysite.com/blue-widget-review has mysite.com ranking for 'blue widget review' while mysite.com/blue-widget-review still ranks for 'blue widget'
Not sure if it means anything but my site's rankings seems to have been hit badly. I had 7/10 keywords in top 100 and since yesterday it has gone down to 2/10. No manual actions in WMT. Only thing I can think of is Google has noticed the links from an SEO service that I used for a month around 2 months ago have disappeared and have reevaluated my rankings. Not sure.
I had this same issue 6 days ago. My site (that usually gets 3000 uniques a day from Google) went down due a wp plugin bug. Was offline for 72h. When it was up again, all the rankings were gone, but came back as normal in two days. Except for this SINGLE page that is still deindexed. It completely disappeared from Google index. Now, my homepage ranks (badly) for that deindexed page keyword. All other keywords are ok. Nothing in Webmasters Tools except for a odd link from this spammy site getitall bid (caution: my antivirus screams when I open it). But checked the site and the link is not there anymore. Anyway, it is just one link and it is gone now. Nothing in Ahrefs and Majestic also. No keyword stuffing. No crawling error. Already submitted to "fetch as Google" in WT. No string from this page can be found in Google index. Basically the same problem as you drogon and other guys. How did you handled it? ps. I can't send PM because I am new to the forum. Someone able to do it, please send this as a PM to drogon! Thanks a lot!
