Lost Ranking For My Primary Page

[Ledrim]

I've been consistently ranked about 8 on Google for my home page, home-theater-design-concepts.com for the keyword "home theater design". The last few days, I'm not ranked at all. I had made some minor adjustments based on the Moz in page report. Which has consistently rated the page as an "A".

Any suggestion about what I should do, should I wait a few more days to see what happens?

[Ledrim]

Thanks Jesse,

Great minds...I already sent the webmaster an email, however it's not quite as thorough as you suggested. And I did send Google a Disavow request, I'll let you know if/when something happens.

[gfiedel]

Jesse, I really like your webmaster letter instructions. Great attitude and tone. I think I'll have to be a bit nicer next time I need to do it. I wasn't not nice, but I like your idea of extra nice.

[gfiedel]

Hi Glenn,

Ouch. That's pretty crummy.

I'm curious is those links have as the anchor text the keywords in question. That may be an important point. But even if they are not causing the current situation, it can't be good to leave intact for the future.

Linkdetox doesn't remove links. It points them out to you and provides an email contact in many cases. Then, it's up to you to follow through and write to the webmaster.

I recommend doing that step and supplementing by visiting the site and leaving a contact request there as well by using whatever contact method they supply. Include as much info as you can- i copied and pasted some of the offending material in my requests. And then cross your fingers. My experience has been that most of these requests fall on dead ears or no ears.

The other critical piece is to keep a detailed record of your efforts in case (i hope this won't be necessary) you need to plead your case to Google in a reconsideration. Not sure if this is a scenario that this would come up, but it's best to be prepared.

[jesse-landry]

Now we are getting somewhere! Okay well I have a lot of experience with this as I have spent many months cleaning up backlink profiles. This is what I would do:

Formulate a well-written and friendly email addressing the webmaster and explaining what has happened and why you are in need of assistance. If possible, try to tie in a note of how removing these links might also benefit their site as Google is clearly identifying it as spam. Send this email to the webmaster along with a list of where the links are located and thank him kindly. (you can find this information on something like who.is if it isn't on the website)

Then, when you don't hear back from the webmaster, try the Google disavow tool and cross your fingers. I personally don't have much experience with the disavow tool  but in your case it seems like it can't hurt...

Other than that I'm not sure what to tell you. I would like to hear how this ends up so keep us posted. I'll be interested to see if this resolves your ranking. Keep building good organic links in the meantime to further develop your SERPs when they do return.

Good luck!

[Ledrim]

Hi Jesse,

A couple of weeks ago I made a comment on a website(projectorreviews.com), while leaving a link to my website. Checking my backlinks, there are now hundreds of links from that website. Do you have any suggestion about how I can remove these comments/links. When you go to the actual site, you can't see the comments.

[Ledrim]

Hi Gina,

A couple of weeks ago I made a comment on a website(projectorreviews.com), while leaving a link to my website. Checking my backlinks, there are now hundreds of links from that website. Do you think the linkdetox can/will remove these links?

[jesse-landry]

Interesrting... Well ahrefs.com will tell you exactly what/where those links are living and is an awesome tool for such. It might help you to better track down where this is coming from.
Examples of what might have happened: redirects, server merges, super-popular blog (unlikely), changes to robots.txt, ... i'm missing a few and probably not realizing the one that caused this.

Hope this gets you on the right track anyway.

[Ledrim]

Thanks Jesse,

I checked out that gyazo link and I don't know where all those links came from. I have been a little more aggressive lately with google + postings and blog postings that include a link back to my site, but nothing like what that report is showing.

[jesse-landry]

404 pages will not negatively affect your rankings such as you are describing here. They will simply slow the crawl and eventually those pages will be de-indexed.

I think your link profile needs to be cleaned up. You may have been penguined, even though you don't have a message in GWMT. Looking at your link profile, your anchor text is weighted heavily towards keywords. I used ahrefs.com to take a quick peak and here is a screenshot of what I mean:

http://gyazo.com/93ac3cdc32d675cf270da649d08b76af.png?1366817300

I would work on a couple things. Start with building new backlinks from reliable relevant sources with a high DA and PR. Blog, guest blog, build infographics and content, social media-it-up, etc. Get your anchor text to be the URL or maybe an IMG so it's [ NO TEXT ] instead. If you have some black hat seo links from the past, try to remove them.

--- I'm interrupting my thought here as I just looked at something else on your site. It seems you've built a ton of links recently.. or at least the interwebs think you did. I'm not sure what happened, but it looks like you darn near doubled your backlinks in just a few short days. Look at this chart and notice the spike starting in April:

http://gyazo.com/f4eb54f5fb2243d83fef353d8f629e74.png?1366817450

This may have everything to do with why the sudden drop in rankings. This spurt of link building may have earned a penalty. Consider removing those links and slowing your link building efforts.. it looks like you went to a submission service and paid for link blasts. Whether you did that or not, that is what Google will see.

I would keep watching GWMT for an Unnatural Link warning/penalty notice in the coming days and begin working on a resubmission request if it happens or if you did have some link blasts in the past. You might know better why the sudden blast of backlinks occurred there... OSE is not reporting the same numbers in the Just Discovered tool but that's not terribly surprising.

My response is kind of all over the place and might not be helpful. Sorry about that. Good luck, keep us posted!

[gfiedel]

Gosh, Glenn. That is exactly how it was for us. Just 2 keywords dropped. Everything else was the same.

As I said, I don't know exactly what fixed mine, but one thing I did not long before the listing reappeared, was to use http://www.linkdetox.com.

I located one really bizarre link on an article submission site that I did not do myself, that had duplicate content to an article on my site and fictitious author names. I got it removed. I was doing other things simultaneously, but there's a chance that was it even though I'm not sure it had the keywords as anchor text.

Give link detox a try just in case.

[Ledrim]

Thanks Gina,

Since I received an "A", I only made one or two changes, one that I can recall is commenting out the Keyword tag, I'm wondering if that had anything to do with it.

[gfiedel]

Hi Glen,

This has a familiar ring to it regarding my own experience with On-Page Reports. In fact, it brings up a caution I'd like to share with fellow MOZers, especially newly arrived folks. Watch out for those report cards. They are seductive and can be harmful if one over-focuses on them.

When I first subscribed to SEOMOZ, I had seen a small drop in my SERPs for the most critical  keyword for my Home page.

I just loved those on-page reports because they addressed something I felt I had some control over and was familiar with executing. They offered something I could DO when i didnt understand what was happening. I went a little overboard  trying to get 'A's' on my reports. And with each slight position SERP improvement, I got more greedy and did more. And I succeeded with getting A's.

AND/BUT as a result (or at least partially), my page dropped completely out of sight to "not in the top 50". But those keywords had A's! I now believe I overstuffed those keywords and while for a week or so, it improved my ranking, it then settled down to a completely plummeted spot. I now think i I had gone over the line.

In reality, this turned out to be a blessing in disguise (lost business aside) because it forced me to learn a whole bunch of good stuff and to get off my butt on things I'd procrastinated.

My rankings are back and I'll never know the exact cause of the drop, but I no longer look for high grades on my Reportcards. In fact, even with my rankings back, I think the grades are pretty stinky. I now have a 'C' for that term (and even an F for a term ranking OK) and that's just fine.

The point of this story is that it's better to focus on developing great content, publisize it on your social accounts and work towards earning quality links. The grades don't mean as much as you may think.

[Ledrim]

I'm checking my webmasters tools and over the course of time I've changed the names or deleted various pages on my site which has resulted in 404 codes. Would this have a negative affect on my ranking since these pages are no longer on the actual site. If so, what's the best way to resolve this.

Appreciate your help.

[Ledrim]

I check almost every day, just noticed about 2 days ago.

[SEOAndy]

mmm sounds like you've had a penalty then if its just a specific term. when did you notice this drop and when was the last time you checked before that?

[Ledrim]

Thanks Andy,

I've had a first page rank for a few years now, so I don't think that the linking issue would completely drop me off of Google. I have high ranks for other keywords, just not my main keyword.

[SEOAndy]

looks like you need to do some link building maybe...

search this on google

link:www.home-theater-design-concepts.com

only a few links seen