Google manual penalty?

[gfiedel]

Is it possible to receive a manual penalty on just 2 keywords (or any penalty for that matter) from Google but receive no message in GWT? I am going to give a lot of information here, in the hopes that it will be helpful. My apologies if it's too long.

Some of you who are here a lot, may remember my panicked questions in early January. I have learned a ton since then but I still haven't fully solved our mystery and one of the questions that remains is if perhaps one can receive a penalty for particular keywords only and not receive any messages.

Our company name, company name.com and company name + location is still coming up #1. We also still have a couple of other keywords at #4 and #7 so it seems our site wasn't penalized. My over-zealousness with the keyword usage on our Home page was pointed out to me here in the forum by Dr. Pete so I made some significant changes on that back in January and continue to tweak although I'm afraid at this point, to do too much that may cause us to lose ranking in the last two good keywords...Meanwhile, our listings on Bing and Yahoo are great and mostly continue to go up.

Back Story: We had a huge drop in the SERPS for a particular set of keywords that I feel are our most critical, at the end of December 2012 after being #3 for over a decade. We had a smaller drop in October, that worried me and I worked on the on-page and brought it back to #7 sometime in Nov or early Dec and then it disappeared to "not in top 50". I believe I overdid it.

I also got a lot of great advice and leads from Mike Tek and have been having a blast being engaged in reading, learning, following, commenting. I believe I have created some good content since January by creating a company blog and adding posts regularly- 19 so far.  I have also gotten some reviews on Yelp, claimed more local listings, worked on our Google+ page, joined Communities, have been promoting our blog posts on FB, Linkedin, Twitter, Google+. We are very short in the inbound link department and I have yet to activate solutions on that score, (and sadly, the majority of our links are in client footers as we are a web design company and I don't think we should remove them without being sure they've hurt us). I am at the point of looking for some help for hire for link building as I am realizing my own limitations.

[gfiedel]

So sorry! One more question, please, Takeshi. My husband just reminded me that we purchased a second domain name in October and set up a redirect or forwarding to our site domain. He kept the page authority for the main URL. Our site is www.fateyes.com and the additional URL is www.fateyeswebdesign.com and that points to fateyes.com.

[gfiedel]

oh yeah, duh. It's not personalization. Thanks.

[TakeshiYoung]

By personalization I meant sometimes our search results can be personalized, leading to different SERPs than what other people would see.

[gfiedel]

Wow- thanks again! Much appreciated.

We did make some changes in September and early October and I was pushing with  on-page SEO on the Home page between Oct. and Dec. after the first hint of slippage, but have since pulled it back and tried to revert as much as I could remember. In late September and early October, our overseas programming company made some suggestions for page descriptions and meta keywords that I adopted, but that shouldn't matter.

The big thing they did was some link building and one article submission which I may have overstepped duplicate content with an article, now blog post, on our site to a certain extent, not understanding that issue at the time. There were 24 links listed and 268 submitted. None of the anchor text is a match for the keywords in question. Believe me, I will NEVER do that again. I don't think these guys would do anything shady, but now that I've learned more, I don't like what they did much anyway.

But with no messages from Google, it's so hard to know if it's the links. I was studying their report this morning, and there are some sites with 0 PR. I'm thinking about trying to get those removed. Do you think I should?

What do you mean by personalization? And no, the site's been up since 1998.

Thanks again!

[TakeshiYoung]

It's really difficult to tell what's happened in situations like this without knowing all the details. Broadly speaking though, there are only 3 possibilities:

1. Your competitors have improved their pages
2. You changed something on your site that is causing you to rank lower
3. Google changed their algorithm in such a way as to negatively affect you

You said that #1 probably isn't the issue here. Then you need to look at every single change you made to your site within the timeframe of the drop, and see if you can figure out what you did that might have caused it. Did you change the content? Did you edit the underlying code? Any technical site changes? Any configurations changes in GWT? Etc. If it's something you can reverse easily, try reverting some of the changes you made, and see if they had an impact.

If none of that works, and you aren't doing anything shady, then it was probably an algo change. The question then is how to get Google to see your site as relevant for those terms. Link building helps. Quality content is crucial. Since it looks like you are doing local SEO, then things like business citations, listing in business directories, Google+ profiles, all those things will help. Look at your competitors, and see what they are doing. If they are doing anything that makes their site better than yours, steal it.

That's basically all you can do. All this is assuming this isn't some reporting error or personalization, or that your site isn't brand new and being thrown into the sanbox.

[gfiedel]

Thank you so much, Takeshi. I really appreciate your input.

I doubt it has to do with link over-optimization. Our anchor text doesn't match the keywords in question which are 'web design' plus our location and our location 'web design'. They are very competitive words and I can see dropping several positions or to lower pages, but a sudden one time drop to out of top 50 seems to point to something severely wrong. Our competition at the top of the rankings have a lot of links and a lot more content than we do, so I understand why they are there, and it's possible that some newer companies have outranked us momentarily, but I am sure that the 50 or so ahead of us --- well, there aren't even that many web design or development companies here or nearby. Our domain authority, while it's dropped during this situation, is still higher than many. I think it may come down to a simple case of them having more links than us-some do and some don't, and I'll bet many aren't quality.

So true that there are no guarantees....and yet, I find it really compelling to try to figure out what happened. Not knowing what's broken makes it harder to fix and also harder to not repeat the same error- although, I have a lot of good ideas on what not to do in the future. I do get a little preoccupied by this question from time to time, but primarily, I've been working on creating high quality, relevant content and promoting the content in the hopes of getting links. As I mentioned, I'm on the cusp of trying to get some assistance with a link building campaign because I know it's a weak spot for me and I welcome suggestions of someone to work with.

[TakeshiYoung]

Rankings for individual keywords change all the time, but in my experience drops to specific keywords have usually been the result of link over-optimization (too many links with the same, unnatural anchor text).

Other potential causes: losing links that you used to have, competitors optimizing their pages, any changes you have made to those pages which may impact relevance, changes to your internal linking, or Google updates devaluing previously values links.

There are many reasons why keywords fluctuate. Google controls the SERPs, and your position is not guaranteed even though you may have been there for years. If there are any obvious site errors, fix them, but beyond that you just have to focus on building authoritative links and creating high quality, relevant content.