Why did I lose my Page 1 ranking for my main term?

[webkrew-88915]

My site is http://www.killthezombies.com.  I have historically ranked on page 1 for the term "zombie games" up until the beginning of 2012, since my site was launched in 2008.  Now I am not in the top 100 at all, since Panda.

Over the last year, I've tried many things to answer and solve this problem.  I've cleaned up onsite issues, and I've tried to be more active in link building since I historically allowed my users to build links organically.

While I don't expect to rank #1, since many of my competitors have the term "zombie games" in their domain, and they are far more aggressive on backlink building than I am, I do not understand why my domain is not even in the top 100.

It's clear I used to rank, and that Bing and DuckDuckGo still think KillTheZombies.com belongs on page 1.

I have reached out to Google to see if I've been penalized, and they actually got back to me to say I have not been.  Google Webmaster Tools shows no crawl issues or warnings.

I have many #1 rankings for terms like "zombie killing games", "kill zombies", etc.

Does Google now think my site is about "kill the zombies" and somehow not about "zombie games", which is clearly my subject matter and something I've optimized for?

[webkrew-88915]

Can anybody provide insight from the timing in my search history graph?

[webkrew-88915]

Here's the history of SE traffic.  The jump earlier this year is improperly labelled Adwords traffic.

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[webkrew-88915]

Thanks Marie, I believe you're right about needing more help than just the forums.  It's a start.  I'm willing to hire if the right person sees this.  The site itself doesn't make much money, but it's a labour of love.. it's been with me for 6 years.

I think the answer is in the gaps of my own knowledge.  I know enough to feel like I'm covering all of my bases, but I'm not a studied Panda or Penguin expert - reading a few articles over the past year, but that's about it.

The redesign was a vast improvement in SEO over the previous site, but I'm too close to it to know if there was one key strength of the old site that I ignored.

I really think that google gives my competitors a pass on using link test like "zombie games" because it's in their URL, while if I use it, they see it as unnatural.  I've never been warned though, so it's hard to say.  It seems the landscape really favours using "zombie games" in the url right now.  Everyone in the top 20 has this, and I don't.

[MarieHaynes]

If you're not in the top 100 then there is probably some type of penalty or filter going on.  My best guess, again, is Panda.  Here is some information that may help you understand Panda: http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/panda/

Not having the word "zombie games" in your url is not going to make you drop out of the first 10 pages.  Plus, if you dropped at the end of Sep it either has to be EMD (which it can't be because your domain name is not exact match) or Panda.  Panda will cause a whole site to drop, or sometimes just a section.  But, if Google perceives that the majority of your site is either thin or duplicated then it puts a Panda flag on the site and won't allow you to rank well.  A few good pages in the midst of hundreds of thin pages are probably not enough to help you escape Panda if this is what it is that's affecting you.

"I think it's a legitimate backlink text though because my website is literally a list of zombie games." - Things have changed in the last year about using exact anchor text.  It's not good practice and can get you penalized.  Whether it has, in your case is hard to say.  If you were penalized it would be either an unnatural links penalty in which case you'd have a warning in WMT or it would be Penguin and you really should have had a drop on Apr 24, May 25 or October 5.  So, again, I'd focus more on Panda than Penguin.

I fear that you may be over your head though in trying to tackle this.  Forums like this are great for getting tips here and there, but you're not likely going to get a solution as this would probably entail someone spending a good 5-10 hours going over your site, your redesign issues, your analytics and your backlinks.

[webkrew-88915]

Some issues I think I might have:

• Too many internal links.  I have 80 games on my homepage and both have both an image and a text internal link - that's 160.. maybe I can join them in the same A tag?
• I don't use any canonical tags - yet I have a lot of "duplicate" content, such as every game has both a regular and "full screen" version, and every category of games has pagination.

[webkrew-88915]

Wow, you're a wealth of knowledge!  Thank you so much for taking the time with me, this can be overwhelming and it's easy to make mistakes when you think you're making things better.

Webmaster Tools says that most of my backlink text is for "kill the zombies", but I have spent time trying to create backlinks for "zombie games".  I think it's a legitimate backlink text though because my website is literally a list of zombie games.  All of my competitors get the same backlink text, but the difference is their url has "zombie games" in it.

When these problems happened, I grabbed onto the advice that the best SEO was to create good content.  I hired a copywriter who writes descriptions of games for the inner pages, and blog posts.  She writes new content 3 times a week.  For this reason, I don't expect that onsite text or content would be my problem, because my competitors that outrank me definatily do not do this.

The biggest and most clear drop was September 28.  I also remember that being when my ranking went out of the top 100.  It is likely best to focus on that one.

So, I come back to my first question - why am I not in the top 100?  I would understand not being in the top 5, or even the top 10, but not in the top 100 points to a definite PROBLEM.  Something is wrong with "zombie games".  Google is purposely excluding me from that group.

[MarieHaynes]

The first point I'd like to make is that you've got a lot of different things going on.  I'll give you my thoughts but I wouldn't take this advice to the bank because there may be multiple factors.

September 28 was EMD, but you don't have an EMD.  An EMD would be if you had a very poor domain that was ONLY ranking because it was called zombiegames.com.  You were not affected by EMD.  When EMD hit I asked people to send me domains that were affected. Most of them had Panda issues.  It turns out that Google sneakily refreshed the Panda algorithm on Sept 27.  It was a big one too...I've seen a lot of sites that were severely affected by that Panda refresh.

There was no major algo change June 1.  It's not Penguin unless it happened directly on May 25 which was a Penguin refresh date.  Penguin didn't cause a gradual drop.  There was no algo change Aug 30 or December 24.  You mentioned you redesigned your website.  If you didn't put url redirects in place properly then this could cause issues.  Or if you changed your title tags.

Regarding anchor text, I'm talking about the links pointing to your site.  For example, the link pointing from this site to yours is anchored with "zombie games": http://www.pokerunderworld.com/.  And this one: http://www.tantraonline.ph/forum/showthread.php?8465-Forsaken-Guild-of-Shiva/page2

If your drop wasn't on a Penguin day then I wouldn't go removing links though.

The issue is most likely to be one of quality (which would fit with Panda).  Look at your site through Google's eyes.  When the crawl the home page, what are they going to see?  They can't decipher images and you've got no text.  And all of your inner pages are very thin...just 1-2 lines of text.

[webkrew-88915]

Hi Marie,

Thank you for your feedback.  It's hard to look at the site as it is today in response to the original issue because I've reactively tried a few changes this past year.

The major drops have been:

September 28, 2012 - organic traffic dropped overnight from 1,500 to 750.  This was the EMD update, and I actually expected my ranks would improve since Exact Match Domains tend to dominate my niche.  It actually seemed to strengthen the value of domains with "zombiegames" in the URI.

June 1, 2012 - organic traffic began a gradual drop from 3,000 per day to 1,500 per day by August 30, 2012.  This could be a Penguin issue, although the change was not sudden.

December 24, 2011 - February 1, 2012 - organic traffic dropped from 4,000 per day to 3,000 per day.  This was around the time I had redesigned my website.

I don't actually see the "zombie games" anchor texts on my pages.  Can you point to some areas that you think should be changed?  The term "zombie games" shows up in my homepage 11 times:

2 - title tag (changed March 23, previously title was "Zombie Games - Kill The Zombies!")
2 - description tag (has been this way for a few months now)
1 - main menu
1 - footer menu
1 - in an <a>tag under the logo image, inside an</a>

<a>- could this be seen as hiding a keyword?

2 - in other headings.  I should use

instead of **..

1 - in the copyright line

Thank you!
Ryan**</a>

[MarieHaynes]

Are you sure your rankings dropped on a Panda day and not Penguin?  You have a lot of links using the anchor text "zombie games" and that could easily get you affected by Penguin.

If it was a Panda date on which your organic traffic dropped then you've got to look for the two most common Panda factors: duplicate content and thin content.  I think the latter would most likely be your problem.  Your pages all have only 1-2 lines of text on them.  If this is Panda then the solution is probably to beef up the text on each of your pages.

[webkrew-88915]

Thanks Scott for the thoughtful answer.  I set up http://www.killthezombies.com/zombie-games/ last year for the purpose, but I never figured out how to 301 my homepage to that sub-page, and I wasn't sure if it was very smart to stop using my root directory.

What do you think about it?  I like your feeling that using the word zombie more than once in the url could be bad.

Would 301'ing www.killthezombies.com to games.killthezombies.com be your best advice?  Personally, I don't like it, but that's coming from my heart, not my SEO brain.

Since I'm not even in the top 100, I lean towards google penalizing or sandboxing me in some way.  It's hard to imagine Google thinks 100+ sites are better for "zombie games" , especially when I've got the 2nd oldest "zombie games" site in the niche.

[ScottJames13]

Sorry to hear about your troubles. From my understanding google puts more emphasis on contextual links that point to your site, where as Bing and other search engines will look more at your on page SEO, which looks good from what I can see for zombie games.

The only thing that I see right away is that zombie games is not in your URL, which would help you rank for that key word. The issue you face to me would be either to put more effort into building backlinks to your home page for zombie games, or to create a subdomain or another page with zombie games in the URL:

zombiegames.killthezombies.com or killthezombies.com/zombiegames

Which actually might be over kill I try not to repeat terms in the URL as it looks spammy to me maybe:

games.killthezombies.com or killthezombies.com/games

If you're not showing up in the top 100 this would be the tactic I would choose, but this would be like starting from the beginning and you would have to build links back to this page to really complete with other sites ranking for that keyword.