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Thank you, that's kind of what I thought.

Please take a look at the attached images which show the apparently inverse relationship between one of our top competitors (purple trace) and us (blue trace). There seems to be a fairly clear correlation, we're just left wondering what could have happened to cause this.

It seems clear that the 'purple' team was termporarily able to beat us out on the keywords we were working on, but a few questions arise:

1. Did the purple team beat us out, or did we screw something up?

2. If they beat us out, what on earth did they do because it clearly wasn't content creation (they have a skimpy site with no blog and their Alexa score is almost identical to ours

3. We took some steps to fix our situation including:

4. Page optimization

5. website speed improvement

6. Blog review and update

7. You can see from the second graph (rankings) that our keyword rankings slid starting may/2018 along with our traffic, but we regained our footing a year later (now).

8. I guess the big questions are:

9. were there black hat tactics at play here?

10. If so, what were they likely to be?

11. did the problem go away because the purple team stopped paying someone for these results?

12. Was it our fault but we fixed it?

13. what is the most likely reason for this problem?

14. Could it have been a Google  algorithm update? Which one?

Anyway, any insight that you can give would be appreciated.

-- PeteR

FHM1Sn0

Do you know if an H1 within a div that has a 'display: none' style applied will still be crawled and evaluated by Google? We have that situation on this page on line 136:

view-source:https://www.junk-king.com/services/items-we-take/foreclosure-cleanouts

Of course we also have an H1 up at the top of the page and are concerned that the second one will cause interference with our SEO efforts.

I've seen conflicting and inconclusive information on line - not sure. Thanks for any help.