Huge Ranking drop without touching the page

[sportstvjobs]

I was ranked #5 for the keyword "Become a Sportscaster" - had been in the top 10 for months, then all of a sudden dropped to #46. I haven't touched this page in a few months, so I don't think I messed anything up.

Any thoughts on why such a dramatic drop would happen?

Brian Clapp

Founder, SportsTVJobs.com

[sportstvjobs]

will do thanks!

[ShaMenz]

Hi Brian,

I believe the recently introduced SEOmoz Ranking process is currently in Beta (I am in the Beta group) and Casey did specifically ask for feedback on any apparent anomalies during the Beta testing phase.

Just caught up with Casey and the answer will be slightly different depending on whether you are a member of the Beta or not, so just a correction to my original comment:

• If you are not in the Beta then you should email support [at] seomoz.org
• If you are a member of the Rankings Beta and forgot - email the Beta team!

This being the case, it would probably be a good idea to email him direct to bring the issue to his attention.

Sha

[sportstvjobs]

appreciate the response dvtruong - I worked with Angie for many years, back when I was the news director at Fox Sports Northwest - great lady. Anyway back to SEO - we've started getting more links for cnn.com, a bunch of edu's and some other big sports sites - so I hope to see our overall numbers increase. Quality content is our main priority so glad to see we are on the right track, we only lauched in NOvember last year so I know its a slow ramp..

thanks again for the insight.

Brian

p.s. we're in seattle too.

[RyanKent]

Someone else reported a similar issue with their SEOmoz ranking report. I would suggest contacting the Help Desk so they can investigate the issue. It seems like a bug.

[sportstvjobs]

interesting ryan thanks - I actually was referring to the ranking from my SEOMOZ crawl this past week... so no operator error. According to my ranking report I dropped from 5 to 46 last week and then from 46 to 48 this week.

guess its an seomoz reporting issue if you still see it ranked 5th.

[RyanKent]

I was ranked #5 for the keyword "Become a Sportscaster" - had been in the top 10 for months, then all of a sudden dropped to #46

I called a friend who works at Google and he restored your ranking to the #5 spot.

Ok, I am teasing but only a bit. I took a look and in Google.com I see you ranked #5 for the term "Become a Sportscaster". Perhaps when you checked the term was slightly altered. An extra space, a missing space, adding a plural, etc. can all change the search results.

[SparkplugDigital]

It could be a lot of things. Google makes changes to their ranking algorithm about 400 times a year, so they may have turned a knob that happened to affect your site a lot.

I checked out your site and it looks like it has a lot of quality content so I don't think the Panda Update would have been a factor. I liked the Angie Mentink interview - I know her well since I'm in Seattle.

I would not worry too much about one single phrase because it is probably driving a very small percentage of your overall traffic. How is your organic search traffic overall? That is much more important than a single phrase since 70% of search traffic are from long tail searches. I would recommend continuing to pump out remarkable content that people want to share and you should be in good shape in the long run. It looks like your site has 58 linking domains according to Open Site Explorer. Increasing this number over time should help with more competitive phrases.