Sudden decline in ranking

[chris.elevate]

Hi SEO People,

Rankings for one of my search keywords has declined over the last two weeks from place 2-4 down to 13-15 on Google NZ. It had sat at the place 2-4 level for months.

Nothing has changed on any of the sites above/below ours, and nor have any changes been made to our site.

All our other, similar, keyword rankings have either stayed unchanged or improved.

Does anyone have any bright ideas?

[chris.elevate]

Precisely! Sorry if my initial question was not clear (need to learn proper SEO speak).

I will attempt to get in contact with the site owner.

Thanks Marcus

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Chris

You have pretty much nailed it and you do have no access to that page however I would try one thing.

If you check that page it is still indexed in Google:

info:www.pressreleasesworld.com/team-building-auckland-how-to-choose-your-partner/

So, you could contact them and tell them that a page that clicked on in the Google results generated a page not found error on their site. If you can get this message to the right person they may well fix this.

Not to say you would not want to push on with other link building anyhow but... this could be the best of both worlds.

It does not always have to be technical.

Marcus

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Chris Just to clarify: do you mean that the this is the best (or was the best) link using anchor text from an external site and it now no longer exists? If that is the case, then you could contact the site owner and let them know that they have a 404 there and send them a cached version of the page so they can fix their issue. Alternatively, you likely need another good link to get back to where you were. Hope that helps. Marcus

[TomRayner]

In this case, you might want to consider setting up a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file.  Here's a quick how-to guide.

Redirect it to a relevant page and it should pass on the strength that it had.  This in turn could help the new page to rank for the term.

[chris.elevate]

It's the Top Linking Page Using Anchor Text.

I would ASAP DIY but I have no access to the linking page (unless there is another way?) - http://www.pressreleasesworld.com/team-building-auckland-how-to-choose-your-partner/

[TomRayner]

If your top ranking page was returning a 404 error then yes, there's absolutely no doubt that this would effect its ranking.

The Googlebot would basically be hitting the page and being repeatedly told that there's nothing there and so would devalue its strength in the SERPs as a result (because what user wants to hit a 404 page?)

That's an ASAP-do-it-yesterday sort of fix!

[chris.elevate]

Thanks Tom and Marcus for your insightful replies.

I did some further link analysis and found that the top linking page was now a 404 redirect. I presume that would be the main cause...?

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Chris

Without a link or the keyword it's hard to give anything other than very general advice and this could just be a natural flutter. The SERPS are so volatile that fluctuations happen almost daily so It may not be a cause for concern and it may come back to near where it was in a short matter of time.

If you wanted to dig further, the obvious thing to look into would be the links to your site and specifically any links that used this keyword.

• Do you have low quality links with this anchor text?
• Could links have been devaluated?
• Could low quality pages with links on have been hit by the last panda update?

It is likely nothing to worry about but if you have done some lowish quality link building around this phrase then it may warrant further investigation.

Hope that helps and happy to look a bit harder if you can drop in the keyword and a link.

Marcus

[TomRayner]

It's not a large enough of a drop for me to think that your site may have been effected by an update.  Regardless, if you have webmaster tools set up (and if not, do so), my first step would be to check for any messages from Google.

After that, I'd analyse your own link-building campaign over the last month or two and maybe compare it against a few competitors and see if there are any differences and short comings.  Open site explorer has recently had its index updated, so it can help in this case.