Why Is My Site Doing This?

I have a site where I publish at least one post per day. But, something weird is happening.

Every post that I well...post, even after:

1. Keyword targeting,
2. Schema.org markup,
3. Thorough on-page using Frase,
4. Internal linking using Inlinks,
5. Not using internal linking,
6. Integrating keywords into the on-page,
7. Observing 3,000+ longform word count,
8. Observing what the other search results are doing and also:
a. Combining aspects of the top 5-10,
b. Also creating a completely unique post that also includes new perspective,
c. Including internal linking on-page,
d. Including images and image optimizations on-page.
e. Including statistics where possible.
9. Observing all best practices including a. Optimizing per patterns in existing page titles and meta descriptions, b. including the keywords in the page title and meta descriptions, c. Observing Google's guidelines.
10. Varying the format of the posts after identifying what's common among all top 10 search results.

What happens is that, it will rank in the top 10-15 posts in 24 hours (often in much less of a time frame), but then the post will drop off, often out of the top 100 and will never rank again.

What in the ever-living crap am I doing wrong here? I can't get any of my posts to stick.

Please note: I am not doing anything shady with my SEO at all.

Lack of authority? Can you describe your link profile and tell the age of the website/domain history?

What is the age of site and metrics
Are you using Duplicate articles or anyone doing Negative SEO.

mrneedles said:

Lack of authority? Can you describe your link profile and tell the age of the website/domain history?

Click to expand...

The domain is a domain that's around 2 years old. It is also a clean domain.

The link profile is clean. There has been nothing shady going on there either.

Domain authority is over 25.

JoeShuster said:

What is the age of site and metrics
Are you using Duplicate articles or anyone doing Negative SEO.

Click to expand...

Site is 2 years old. No duplicate articles. No negative SEO.

DA is over 25.
Over 425 referring domains.
Over 3,500 backlinks.
No negative SEO.
No duplicate articles.

Your site is dipping , use good content ! What are your site stats

You need to stay hard

Hawkeye Digital said:

Your site is dipping , use good content ! What are your site stats

Click to expand...

It is great content, though. By all measurements, better than what's on the SERPs.

There are also no visible user shifts in how they are searching, or when it comes to search intent for articles that have dropped.

Site stats, according to GSC per the last three months include:

Over 12,000 clicks
Over 5 million impressions
Over 0.1% CTR
Average position of around 60.1 that just won't budge.

BlackHatInTraining said:

It is great content, though. By all measurements, better than what's on the SERPs.

There are also no visible user shifts in how they are searching, or when it comes to search intent for articles that have dropped.

Click to expand...

then check over that how many backlinks you are losing could be that too .

Probably still in the sandbox
Do you see any impressions in the GSC?

HustleTong said:

Probably still in the sandbox
Do you see any impressions in the GSC?

Click to expand...

Sandbox, even after 2 years?

Yes. Approximately 65,000 - 75,000 impressions per day.

BlackHatInTraining said:

It is great content, though. By all measurements, better than what's on the SERPs.

There are also no visible user shifts in how they are searching, or when it comes to search intent for articles that have dropped.

Site stats, according to GSC per the last three months include:

Over 12,000 clicks
Over 5 million impressions
Over 0.1% CTR
Average position of around 60.1 that just won't budge.

Click to expand...

You have lots of impressions and not so many clicks + low CTR. Do you rank for some navigational or branded searches? And fail at informational?

Also, have it been this way always? Or maybe you ranked earlier? When has this change happened, if so?

mrneedles said:

You have lots of impressions and not so many clicks + low CTR. Do you rank for some navigational or branded searches? And fail at informational?

Also, have it been this way always? Or maybe you ranked earlier? When has this change happened, if so?

Click to expand...

There are two changes that happened recently:

1. That one, where posts don't stick to Google's top 15 easily.
2. Maybe about 2-3 months ago, I stopped posting 5-6 times per day. My hands were tied by management with this decision, though. At 5-6 times per day, posts were more news-type posts. Although the posts sometimes would be only 500-700 words, but they would still rank a little for their targeted keyword phrase. But, management wanted to do informational longform word count only (3,000+), and this limited my production ability.

I hesitate (a lot) to call it a correlation, but that does appear to be when it was easier to stick to the top 15 was when the site was on a larger growth trajectory of posting 5-6 times per day.

BlackHatInTraining said:

There are two changes that happened recently:

1. That one, where posts don't stick to Google's top 15 easily.
2. Maybe about 2-3 months ago, I stopped posting 5-6 times per day. My hands were tied by management with this decision, though. At 5-6 times per day, posts were more news-type posts. Although the posts sometimes would be only 500-700 words, but they would still rank a little for their targeted keyword phrase. But, management wanted to do informational longform word count only (3,000+), and this limited my production ability.

I hesitate (a lot) to call it a correlation, but that does appear to be when it was easier to stick to the top 15 was when the site was on a larger growth trajectory of posting 5-6 times per day.

Click to expand...

Interesting. Have you checked if there is a correlation between what happend to you and the recent Google updates? Think end of August (Helpful Content Update launched) and all the updates that came after that, public and unannounced. First make sure you haven't been partially downgraded in Google in any of the updates.

mrneedles said:

Interesting. Have you checked if there is a correlation between what happend to you and the recent Google updates? Think end of August (Helpful Content Update launched) and all the updates that came after that, public and unannounced. First make sure you haven't been partially downgraded in Google in any of the updates.

Click to expand...

There is no manual penalty in GSC at least. Also, using Panguin doesn't reveal anything obvious. Some queries have a 5% drop. Others might have 10%. Some 15%. It's all entirely random. After doing some updated optimizations with Frase, there have been some improvements but not across the board.