Sudden dramatic drop in "some but not all" keyphrase rankings for client, 3 weeks ago

[chill986]

I noticed recently that 4 of my keyphrases which ranked on page one, and were climbing 3 weeks ago, have suddenly dropped to > 50.  What could have happened?  I did find an issue with my sitemap (yoast generated), but why would that suddenly change?  And even more importantly, how do I fix it?

[chill986]

Thanks for the response, Patrick.

I did find that there was an error on my yoast sitemap-index.xml (404 on pagemap-index.xml) which I was able to fix last night.  Not sure why suddenly there was a problem.  I also found I had the wrong URL specified for the sitemap in my robots.txt - fixed that too.  Other than that, I resubmitted the sitemap, re-fetched my site, and everything looks copacetic in google webmasters as it certainly is being crawled, and no crawl errors.

Up until know, I've simply been massaging the content, ensuring that I hit all of the google criteria according to moz.com as well as the SEO plugin (Yoast) that I am using.  I've not done anything out of the ordinary except I added a slide-in plugin to promote a course my client is teaching (see fisherfinancialgroupllc.com).  I'm not really doing anything with links because I was having such great luck on the work I was doing with content, blogging and social media.  I can only think that maybe the slide-in plugin (had incorrect URL for the button link) might have caused some kind of recursive problem?

It's weird because my key phrases (financial advisor northbrook il, financial advisor northbrook, and financial advisor northbrook illinois) were all ranked around 5 & 6 and still moving up at the end of August, and the following week dropping to > 50.  And the drop didn't effect the "Fisher Financial" centric key phrases, just plain odd.

Not sure what other information I can provide to enable you to help me.   It's a small site and we only update it a couple of times a month other than the occasional blog post done by the client. I appreciate any information you can provide!

Not sure why my question is marked as answered.  This is the first time I've ever posted a question here, and saw that I if I liked your answer but wanted to keep the thread open to click on "Good Answer".   Sigh.  Hope you see my response, and that others can as well.

Cindy

[WhiteboardCreations]

Cindy,

It sounds like you were hit with a penalty by Google. If you have a Webmasters account, check that for any notifications about a penalty or tactics which would adversely affect your website pages. If you don't have a Webmasters account, then I'd do that asap and submit your website for indexing... then see what comes back.

It's hard for anyone in this forum to give you advice on how to "fix it" without knowing what you were doing. Can you provide some more info about what tactics you have been implementing to climb rankings in terms of SEO, traffic generation, etc? Knowing this would help get a better idea of what the problem could be and how to resolve.

Patrick