Weird Rankings Issue - Never seen before!?!?

So something weird has happened with my Google SERPs and I've never seen it before. This is a site which is about 1 year old. It's a very high quality site (in my eyes anway!). The content is all handwritten by myself, it's not copied. The posts are between 400-1000 words long. It's got photos that I've taken or made on Illustrator, it gets lots of comments, low bounce rate, quite a lot of FB, Twitter, etc shares with the people that view it.

I only build high quality backlinks. I write articles for ezinearticles and they often get syndicated by other people on their blogs. Not a crazy amount, but I've notice that all of them have been syndicated a few times. I do hubpages, make good quality presentations and pdfs to share that rank highly and are often downloaded by people.

The problem is...My rankings are not anywhere in the top 500. In fact I stopped searching after this. But if I google the name of the blog, it comes in at number 1. All of the inner pages are nowhere to be seen. I used to rank #1 for a lot of keywords and now nothing at all. I've seen this before, I used to do a lot of blackhat churn and burn sites, but this one is different. It's a blog that I enjoy writing about and produce very high quality content and backlinks. The backlink anchor text is diverse, I don't employ any blackhat methods at all. My twitter account gets real retweets, my FB page gets real shares, nothing has been faked.What is confusing is that it's still #1 for the blog title, but nothing else. I've never seen this before. If I got hit in the past, the whole site was knocked down. But this one isn't.

I have webmaster toos and there is no messages about spam or unnatural looking links. It's quite surreal.I wonder if anybody can shed any light on the topic.

This is my first post, so I can't send any IMs. But if anybody would be kind enough to take a look and try to give me an idea of what's going on. I'd be most grateful!

It seems like that the blackhat seo tools are being used by other sites that are competing for your keywords. Must be a popular niche, which is quite a terrible thing since you said you enjoy doing it and you put up quality articles.

The new blackhat seo services try to replicate real users on FB,Twitter and many others. They also try to replicate natural linkbacks.
And there doing this on a mass scale. So no offence it would be easy for them to climb above you.

Try to get back into SEO, use your analytics, look for how people visited your site, capture their search in google. Using this redo your meta-tags, Google also looks at the titles of your page. Update your sitemap yourself not an automatic one. Update your robot.txt file too.

Welcome to whitehat

How hard are the keywords you want to rank for?

My advice:

Keep building high quality links
Research long tail keywords that are less competitive - target 10 - 20.
Keep using social media to drive traffic.

OK. Now I've noticed something else.

If I take a sentence and google it, my site doesn't come up at all. If I google it in " " then it still doesn't come up. If I search for site:mysite keywords, then it is listed.

I've noticed that a lot of people have copied my website content and not linked back to me. Would this be the cause of the problem? Duplicate content? Even though mine was published many months before? Maybe I should contact them with a copyright notice thing.

If you're not in top 500, it's probably due to your on-page. In most cases, regardless of how hard competition is, having proper on-page and just a few high quality links (sometimes no links) should already put you within the top 500. Competition only really matters when you get close to the top ranks. Do you have all the basic on-page factors to tell google what each of your pages is about?

If your content has been taken by other people but they have not linked back to you. There is a good chance yours will end up in the supplemental index until your sites builds some authority. Google is flawed in this way. Instead of them showing the first indexed content, they show the one with the higher authority. There are lots of articles on this if you search on the internet.

Thanks for the advice everybody. I was ranking #1 for nearly 1 year for all my keywords. The onsite SEO is OK. It's a wordpress site with SEO plugins, so all metatags are there. There is no copied content, keyword stuffing, just well written things. I have about 1000 high quality backlinks including things like articles, hubpages, guest blog posts and natural backlinks that other people have done.

The keyword competition is particularly low for each one. I used Ultimate Niche Finder and did my own research. So, I'm at a loss. Even my scoop.it scoops are ranking the 1st page. That's how easy it is to rank for these.

If I search for a sentence in quotes, nothing comes up. But the site is listed and still ranks for the blog name? I've never seen this before. It's a bit weird. Usually the whole site takes a hit. It's not been delisted. The pages are still there. The homepage still ranks #1. But nothing else can even be found.

I just sent Google a DMCA notice for all the copied content I found for just one of my blog posts. I haven't even begun to go through the others yet.

PM me your URL and I will have a look at it. Its difficult to give a proper answer without knowing how the site exactly is

I would try tiered BLs asap. Try blasting tier 2-3 (or even 4th) with a good SEO tool (I recommend GSA SER) and you will probably come over the top

hardcorebiker said:

PM me your URL and I will have a look at it. Its difficult to give a proper answer without knowing how the site exactly is

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Would love to! Thanks for the offer, but I have only have 3 posts. So maybe I can send you a Skype Message or maybe you could PM me another way to contact you?

BIG changes going on in Google today. Bad changes (for me)

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-17328.html

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JimmyWong said:

BIG changes going on in Google today. Bad changes (for me)

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Hmmm. Very interesting. Seems like my site has been hit. But for no reason that I can see. I see that 3 out of my 50 or so posts still rank first or second page but can't be found if I search for sentences in the post in quotes. All the copied stuff comes up first and my site isn't even listed. This is weird. I'm hoping it'll all sort itself out soon.

There is an on-going update from the 4th September, possibly from the 2nd, still going on. If your site is high quality and sans spam, it could well be a small error in the updating due to datacenters refreshing, you should be back ranking in a day or so. I have found this issue to be the most common reason for dissapearing overnight on whitehat sites and like I say, the sites usually go back to the same SERPS in a day, max. 2 days.

Let us know what has happened in 24 hours, there is being lots of SERP changes for lots of sites since the 2nd.

YouMadBro said:

There is an on-going update from the 4th September, possibly from the 2nd, still going on. If your site is high quality and sans spam, it could well be a small error in the updating due to datacenters refreshing, you should be back ranking in a day or so. I have found this issue to be the most common reason for dissapearing overnight on whitehat sites and like I say, the sites usually go back to the same SERPS in a day, max. 2 days.

Let us know what has happened in 24 hours, there is being lots of SERP changes for lots of sites since the 2nd.

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Thanks for the input. I will definitely keep you posted. I've had Blackhat churn and burn sites blacklisted, delisted, given penalties but never seen this before so I think something else is going on.