Sudden Page Rank Drop for Weight Loss Camp

[FVdBeuken]

My site BalanceME.com has been performing really well and continually climbs more and more but in the last 7 days we have had a drop this last week.  We went from #2 for weight loss camp to #6, and  even further on other terms.

It is mid May and I cannot find any other explanation for the sudden drop.  I am hoping someone could give me some sort if idea what could possibly be the answer.  Recently we have had two press releases go out, target for keywords, and also installed images that navigate to new pages on the site.  There have been few additions to the site, and nothing can explain the drop.

Other companies in our group have not had issues with recent drops, and we use the same practices with the other organizations.

Thank you for your time

[FVdBeuken]

We have bridge sites targeted to create content and give us good anchor text and backlinks to our site.  In the past week or two we have had a serious drop in national rankings for some of the terms.  It turns out the bridge sites were hacked:

weight-loss-camp-california.com

weight-loss-camp-massachusetts.com

They are still broken right now, but one of our developers is on it.  This could have lead to the rankings drop.  We are a white hat organization, so it was interesting to see a drop even if there was an algorithm change.

We check rankings in two ways, locally, and nationally.  Locally we saw a SMALL drop in some targeted markets, but nationally we dropped from #2 to #5 almost over night. I do not understand why this happened... It has happened in the past, and we just waited it out and we actually returned to a better-than-before position.

[KeriMorgret]

What do you mean by bridge sites? Have you cleaned up this hack? If you can give us a few more details, we can help you figure out if this may be contributing to your problem.

[FVdBeuken]

Still dropping, found out bridge sites were hacked... any other ideas?

[FVdBeuken]

Changed it.  The SEO footer text we use put us over in density, but scribe still had us on track.

As I said in the comment below, there was a hiccup in results in the spring that eventually corrected itself.

[FVdBeuken]

We have not lost position with the brand name, and the anchor text for most of the backlinks matches the keyword phrase we are aiming for.

I really wonder if this is a hiccup in the SERP, we had a hiccup in the spring and eventually it went back to normal, actually better than normal...

[MoosaHemani]

I didn’t witness any on-page problem in a quick audit but i guess your linking strategy have a problem the links that are pointing back to your website are mostly with a keyword anchor text... I would highly recommend you to build more links with the anchor text that says your brand name.

[PhilGraham-SlateInboundMarketi]

I haven't had time to look at your site thoroughly but I ran a quick report through our system and something did stick out a bit.

When you compare your site to the other 9 sites (in the top 10) of Google, the average number of times "weight loss camp" is on the page is 0-5 and on your site, it's showing up 9 separate times.

I would either reduce some of that exact anchor text and/or add more text to your homepage to dilute it a bit more. A combination of both is probably best.

If I have some time later, I can take a better look but that's definitely one thing you could address and optimize right now.