Got a weird one here...
Won't give away actual URL but for this example let's say client's site is:
www.purplebananas.com
Many of the longtail keyword-targeted subpages/posts are still ranking pretty well. We recently went through and optimized the site based on poor scores we found from crawl reports from SEO Moz, which included renaming some sub-pages, eliminating duplicate content pages, archives, etc (it's a wordpress site, about 4 years old).
This site used to rank at the top or near it for the search "purple bananas".
However, after we optimized the site it's almost completely fallen off the radar of Google, turns up way over 100 for the search "purple bananas".
Strangely, if we search "purplebananas" we're at the top still.
Any idea what's going on here?
Are we potentially over-optimized or something weird for our own brand!?
Any troubleshooting tips?
FWIW the changes were made about 6 weeks ago and while we're steadily building links, I don't think this is the standard "Google dance".
Thanks!