Dropped to 45th spot. How to track ?

[mageclub]

Hi.. We specialize in CMS Development and all of our keywords were spotted on 1st page always. Most of them were on #1 only.

ON a weekly basis, we only post resourceful blog posts on our website . Since 2-3 months, I have seen quite some drop in traffic and today when I tried the rank status, I see the keywords have dropped to 4th or 5th page.

Is there a way, I can track, what went wrong ?

Where to start with ?

The site always ranked good since 2 years of its start already.

[mageclub]

GWT is clean. And we never had any paid links or something special. All we did was concentrate on social sharing, good on page optimization and then good blog posts about those keywords and social bookmarking mostly.

Thats all. Very odd.

[TomRayner]

Hi there

You may be interested to read this post on some of the recent ranking fluctuations seen late last year/early this year.  It explains very well what appears to be happening - continuous link devaluation.

Now, this isn't a penalty of sorts - it's not related to Panda or Penguin.  It's just a re-evaluation of links pointing to your site.  If you've been concentrating on posts to your site and not actively accumulating editorial type links,  then it might account for the drop.  Simply put, if you haven't been receiving a great deal of high quality links to your site (while competitors have) and your site had links from directories and other places, which may have been devalued (Google has certainly hinted at doing this), then it may account for the drop.

First of all, I'd double check your webmaster tools messages to see if you have received any notifications from Google, just to rule out any suggestion of a penalty. Second, it's worth looking at the pages where the ranking has dropped - for those SERPs that did drop, were they all for the same page? That might indicate link devaluation.