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The organic traffic to our site (fairly new) took a ~50% hit about a month ago due to the drop in our most important keyword. The numbers have come back up and are now exceeding the number before the dip. While this is all fine and dandy, we're still not ranking in the top 50 for our most valuable keyword. We've put out a number of guest post on reputable outside sites and are building a regular cadence of those posts, but my question is, what is the realistic wait time for those organic rankings to increase again?

Last week my ranking for "keyword A" was relatively high at 16. Since then it's dropped a staggering 31 spots. It's certainly the most important keyword we can rank for so seeing it go -31 spots is rather frightening. I have a couple of theories: We haven't included it in our blog content as anchor text but once in the past 2 or so weeks since the last crawl was done by moz on oct. 21. The lack of recent links with the anchor text of "keyword A" pointing back to the blog is causing it to lose it's rapport. I've been adding most of our blog posts to Reddit and we've been getting almost double the traffic from Reddit alone. But with that comes a much higher bounce rate (~80%). Could posting and having visitors bounce from our blog posts cause the ranking to go down? I would love to get your thoughts on this issue. Thanks,