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It would also be a good idea to check what happened to the domain authorities of competitors / similar companies. If they dropped off in a way that's relatively consistent with yours, that could be an indication of something related to the particular Moz update.

Another update on this - I added a rel canonical to the page, making it clear what the true URL that should be appearing in the SERPs is. That URL is the same one that shows up on the SERPs for the version of the keyword without a hyphen.

After doing this, the page appeared briefly on the keyword results with a hyphen and then disappeared entirely again within the same day. It still shows for the keyword with no hyphen.

Often, when I make a change to that page, it will appear in the SERPs for the keyword with a hyphen and then disappear entirely again within hours or days. It consistently appears in the results for no hyphen though, regardless of changes to the page.

Thanks, Donna. Yeah, I'm with you, it doesn't make sense to me and doesn't seem logical. Hopefully, someone else has a theory on something we're missing.

Thanks for your time in looking into it!

Hi Donna,

Yes, in instances where we do appear for "S-EO" it is the same result as for SEO.

And the specific term(s) of concern are "ediscovery" (we are the "E-Discovery (eDiscovery): The Basics Guide" result on page one) vs. e-discovery. Thanks!

Thanks for the reply, Donna.

I believe we do - going back to the example - the terms S-EO and SEO have almost the exact same competition score in Moz, 47% & 48%, respectively (and they really are the same keyword, anyway), and we rank page #1 for SEO but not at all for S-EO...like, not even on the top 200 pages.

Furthermore, I have seen instances where we do appear on page one for S-EO for hours or even days but eventually go away entirely. This makes me think some sort of penalty but, again, I don't see anything in the link profile to indicate that, there have been no black hat tactics that I'm aware of in the three years I've been there, and there's no manual penalty in GSC.

Hi There!

So I work in an industry where there are different conventions for referring to, searching on and spelling the industry name. For example, let's pretend there were a variety of different conventions for referring to the SEO industry. So someone could search for S-EO, SEO, sEO, etc. and those would all be accepted and understood means of referring to the industry.

If we use the SEO example as a comparison for our industry, the two most common conventions would be S-EO and SEO. Using this example, we rank on the first page for the term "SEO" but do not rank AT ALL for the term "S-EO". We have a high-value piece of content that is targeted in the following way: "S-EO (SEO): The Basics Guide" so it is more targeted at the hyphenated word but does not rank at all for the hyphenated version, whereas it is page one for the non-hyphenated term.

As additional pieces of context:

-In general, our site is more targeted at the hyphenated term and there are places where we rank in the top spot for both the hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions. For example, we rank in a top 2 position for both S-EO & SEO software but do not rank at all for the broader "S-EO" term.

-There are times when we do appear on page one for the term "S-EO" but it's typically only for a matter or hours or days and then we disappear entirely from the SERPs for that term. We consistently appear for "SEO."

-I currently do not believe we are dealing with a penalty of any sort - our link profile is clean and our spam score per Moz is 2 / 17.

Any thoughts or ideas as to what is going on here and how we can potentially rank for the term "S-EO?"