Are Forum Links To Website Causing Rankings To Drop ?
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For many years our top keywords hve ranked in top 5. Usually top 3 for a few in particular. The last few months those particular keywords have dropped to 25 +. Our other rankings are doing pretty decent and are remaiing the same. We are members of about 6 forums since they relate to our website and sometime we have contests on them. I do know that the forums are based on those particular keywords and are linking to our website, as well as other forum members linking to us. Each forum has roughly 300 links to our website. It does not seem as if our competitors are affected by this, as they are members of the forums as well.
What could be causing this for these certain keywords? If those forums were affected by Google's new algorythm would this have an affect on our website?
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If all your dealers are running your copy on their sites, verbatim, that could be a piece of your problem... certainly worth looking at. It's not uncommon for an affiliate to out rank their principal even though the principal had the original content up for a year or more prior.
Another thing worth keeping in the back of your mind, as you chase this down - sometimes we don't drop in the SERPs because we dropped, but rather because someone else ROSE.
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The other keywords that are continuing to work rank well are not in the forums. There was nothing done to the pages. The competitors links scores look very similar as we actually are a bit better. But the domain authority number is a bit higher for a few. Our competitors sites actually all have shopping carts and a different link structure. We have more products but currently do not have a shopping cart. Our site has a lot of great unique content and is optimized and getting A and B scores. The only other thing I can think is that all of our dealers are stealing our website content, word for word
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Its impossible to know, but you can research a few things to try to confirm your suspicion:
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Where are most of the links for the affected keywords coming from (if they're mostly from these forums, that's more evidence for your hypothesis)
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What about the unaffected keyword links? If they're also mostly from these forums that's evidence against your theory.
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What about on-site SEO? Have you made any site changes recently? Are your pages keyword cannibalizing each other?
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What do the link profiles of your competitors look like? Did they get most of their links from these forums or elsewhere?
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