Dropped out of Google top 50 - Jan 28 2013

[syndicate]

On Jan 28 - 2013 google dropped many of our keywords from its index.Here is the history of Rank

June 24 2012 - RANK  2 Nov 18 2012 - RANK 8 NOV 25 2012 - RANK 15 JAN 6 2013 - RANK 10 JAN 13 2013 - RANK 21 JAN 20 2013 - RANK 9 Jan 27 2013 - RANK 6 JAN 28 2013 - DROPS OUT OF GOOGLE

Graph

http://i.imgur.com/ABYJ3MS.jpg

The ON PAGE is an A for the homepage, errors and warnings are all DOWN over time.

Would the last Google Update have caused this?

Bing and Yahoo went UP and google dropped right out

http://i.imgur.com/vP8Uvu8.jpg

The red box is the keyword in question, but many others dropped out of top 50

Anyone have any ideas on what I should look for or which update could be responsible?

ABYJ3MS.jpg vP8Uvu8.jpg

[TakeshiYoung]

Seems like it could definitely be over-optimization then. That doesn't seem like a natural link profile at all. See if you can get rid of some of the lower quality links, and focus on getting high quality links with varied anchor text.

[syndicate]

The page is the homepage which was hard coded to be a subdirectory years ago

site.com/hydroponics/

That home URL has 9000 links to it

Summary 1st

ALT TEXT

There are 3295 cells with 1 or more instaces of "hydroponic" in 7000 links
lots of which are spammy directories

PAGE TITLE TEXT

There are 1560 pages with "hydroponic" included in the PAGE title of a link

TARGET URL - 5000 or more of the links goto the homepage

[TakeshiYoung]

Is that number of links to a specific page, or total number of links? What is the ratio of anchor text links vs non-anchor text links for the specific page you are trying to rank for? And where are those links coming from?

[syndicate]

for hydroponics

36 Linking Root Domains Containing Anchor Text 153 Links Containing This Anchor Text

That doesnt seem like a lot

hydroponic only 10 and 59

Totals are

413 Linking Root domains
10,000 links

But of the top 50 keyphrases this is #1 more or less / 50

and then almost all the other links HAVE those two words in the phrase

90% of the links that are not the company name such as

hydroponic flowers
hydroponic gardening

etc

[TakeshiYoung]

Sounds like it could be over optimization then. Take a look at the backlinks for that page, and see if 60% or more are using your keyword as the anchor text. If you've built any low quality links see if you can remove or disavow them.

[syndicate]

Hi Takeshi

No we don't buy or sell link.s

Tons of low quality links - over time its possible there are about 1500 root linking domains some are good some are just directories and stuff like that. Exact match no. It's a single word in this case "hydroponics".  Google is indexing the site fine, and all other keywords were left in the index, only the general keyterms

hydroponic
hydroponics

These two just vanished, things I can think of are over optimization for this word? It ranked top 10 for years then BOOM gone.  The title and meta didn't change for 2 years or more.

Its not a normal drop, they DEINDEXED those 2 keywords specifically  not drop from 10 to 20 , just de-indexed those 2 keyterms

[TakeshiYoung]

The drop in rankings don't seem to correspond to any named Google updates (Panda/Penguin), but Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm and rankings for sites fluctuate all the time.

It's impossible to tell what happened to your site, without knowing more about what happened. Have you purchased or sold links? Have you built tons of low quality links with exact-match anchor text? Did you make any technical changes to your site that may have caused indexation problems? Did you lose any high value links? Etc. There are countless reasons why sites drop in rankings, including just random fluctuations of Google.