Determining why an established competitor's rankings have bombed - What's the best way to go about it?

[Martin_S]

I arrived at work this morning to find my weekly SEOmoz ranking report for a main competitor waiting in my inbox. 90% of the their rankings have tanked in the last day or so by an average of 3 pages - most down from page 1 or 2 where they had been sitting pretty for ages.

I'm not in a state of (total) euphoria about this because a) you should be humble enough not to gloat at your enemy's demise, and b) I need to find out what they did wrong so that I don't make the same mistake, too.

**What is your first suggested port of call to determine where my (vanquished) foe has gone wrong? How much can I find out? **

I do know one thing - with OSE I can see they've used dodgy blogging services but this, to my mind, would have been jumped upon by Google last year. No?

Thanks guys

[alsvik]

Then you can exclude 3, 4, 5 and 8.

I think penalties (like malware and hacks) would not relate to only a keyword/term but rather to the entire site.

So you're down to:

1. Change in the Search Engine Ranking Algorithm

2. Loss of PageRank/Link Popularity

3. Canonicalization Problems

4. Broken links

5. **robots.txt Issues
    **

6. Duplicate Content

Perhaps you could exclude more of the remaining 6 reasons by using the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine. I think it easily could be used to compare present and older use of rel=canonical (3) and robots.txt changes (5).

Reason 4 can be excluded by using Xenu's link sleuth.

[Martin_S]

Thanks mate,

They dropped substantially for most of their terms except for one or two which only dropped buy one or two positions. Does that narrow down the possibilities?

[RankSurge]

It's probably a link purge on their part, and if you were able to see some of their linking activities and were able to identify them, that's probably a good indicator of what they did wrong, and what you should do to avoid it.

[alsvik]

Hi TCE

On February 24, 2011 Google released a major update to its ranking methods popularly referred to as "Farmer" or "Panda" since the purpose was to target so-called "content farms" which are large sites filled with low-quality content. The update also targets sites that have an excessive ratio of advertising to content and sites that have a high level of duplicate or 'scraped' content. This is one of the rare circumstances in which a Google ranking factor works on a site-wide level, as opposed to an individual web page.

You could read this article by Vanessa Fox:  Google Traffic Dropped With Farmer/Panda Update. It suggests ways to analyze why your rankings dropped and how to restore them. I guess this also could be used for competitors

The ten most common reasons for a site dropping rank in SERP:

1. Change in the Search Engine Ranking Algorithm

2. Loss of PageRank/Link Popularity

3. Cinderella Story or "Honeymoon" Effect

4. **Malware or Hacking
    **

5. Google penalty, including:

   • Hidden Text
   • Text Link Ads
   • Thin Content
   • Multiple Domain Names
   • Domain Farms
   • Linking to penalized, or so-called "bad neighborhood" sites
   • Excessive Link Exchanges

6. Canonicalization Problems

7. Broken links

8. Server Problems

9. **robots.txt Issues
    **

10. Duplicate Content

I know these are not direct answers to your question. But my guess is that the Farmer/Panda update caused it or an error in their server at the time of indexing...

But it is almost impossible to identify, without tracking all their moves over time and at the time when the rankdrop happend ...