Cause of drop in rankings

[fluke]

over the last 8 months or so i have been trying to optimise a vacation rental site for three main keywords, one being the name of the property, and the other two being more descriptive keywords. I guess i was in the sandbox for a while because nothing seemed to move for around 3/4 months - even though i was steadily getting links for the site, I ranked about 70 for the name of the property and around 350th for the other 2 keywords.
Over the last 5 or so months the rankings have been going down then slightly up again, etc but overall climbing (ie they climbed 20 places over a fortnight then dropped 10 places, then climbed another 20 and dropped another 10)
eventually i managed to get on the first page for the name and was around 120th for the others (not great but i didn't mind too much as i seemed to be climbing).

I checked my rankings about a week nd a half ago - ad they had slipped to around 180 but didn't think too much of it - i though it was just one of the normal slides that occured between each climb (albeit a slighty larger one)
however i just check today and they've slipped another 70 places!

thats a drop of around 130 places.

i really can't think what could have caused this - especially as it seems to have only happened for some keywords and not others, I have made no alterations to the site or anything.

the only thing i can possibly attribute it too is the fact that i have neglected my link campaign over the last 3 weeks. - perhaps because i havn't been "keeping up with the competition" and it's because a 130 of them that have climbed up.

is this a realistic possibilty? - can anyone else suggest any reasons for this? -

the keywords have 220,000 and 147,000 entries in google respectively
and showed traffic figures of around 800 a month in overture (i'm beginning to feel it wasn't worth the effort though)

however it happened - i really hope it unhappens as i haven't felt this disheartened since the beginning of my link campaign where weeks and weeks of effort seemed to do absolutely nothing (possibly as i was in the sandbox)

I am now back where i was around 3 months ago, apart from i more annoyed than i was then :( :confused:

[Dirkjan]

lost a link to your website? :P

Ya perhaps you have thousands of links to your pages, but still, when you lose your most relevant high PR with good anchor, and perhaps it was even a deeplink, than it can have that particular effect.

Even though you maybe collected dozens of new ones, the loss of this particular one CAN cause horrible things like this.

(its no fun being a seo man and having results against you. Google should be more open in its rankings :P)

[T0PS3O]

The reason must be a Google algo tweak which you won't be able to uncover 100%.

If you didn't do anything wrong then this probably belongs in the 'tough shit' - start over/keep developing department. Maybe all your links were from a not-so-good environment? Lost a high PR link with good anchor text? Too many variables - my guess we'll never know.

[chachi]

fluke, how did your site rank for allinanchor: for the three terms over time?

[dejaone]

ranking scores for pages below 50 are very close. I noticed some of my pages bounce around 100 all time for targeting keyword. the change in SERP may have nothing to do with what you've done or google's algo tweak. It couldcaused by 1) addition of new pages into google index, 2) your competing pages get/lose some backlinks, 3) content change in competing pages.

[DarrenC]

What keywords are you optimising for? Vacation rental KW's are very very competitive! if you don't want to publicise which KW's then PM me - I work in the holiday / vacation industry, so I might be able to give you some pointers.

[fluke]

Crikey - i lost this thread and just found it again - i meant to post it in the google forum: i don't know how it ended up here :confused: :)


fluke, how did your site rank for allinanchor: for the three terms over time?

number 1 for all

What keywords are you optimising for? Vacation rental KW's are very very competitive! if you don't want to publicise which KW's then PM me - I work in the holiday / vacation industry, so I might be able to give you some pointers.

yeah i think real estate/rental are in the most competitive group - thanks for your offer of pointers - i will send you my keywords as mentioning them here will probably knock me down more places!

[T0PS3O]

Crikey - i lost this thread and just found it again - i meant to post it in the google forum: i don't know how it ended up here :confused: :)


Probably moved because in fact it is a review. It's about your site, your SEO work and your rankings. Not much to do with Google.

[fluke]

Probably moved because in fact it is a review. It's about your site, your SEO work and your rankings. Not much to do with Google.

yeah i talked to shawn by pm about it - i think the thing that confused me was the fact that i thought when a thread got moved it mentioned it in the forum it got moved from - i guess i was thinking of other forums though
i guess i thought it as to do with google as it was only in google that i had the drop in rankings.

[Infiniterb]

yeah i talked to shawn by pm about it - i think the thing that confused me was the fact that i thought when a thread got moved it mentioned it in the forum it got moved from - i guess i was thinking of other forums though
i guess i thought it as to do with google as it was only in google that i had the drop in rankings.

You can have a re-direct from the forum it was posted to the new location. That is normally determined by the mover of the thread, in this case, Shawn didn't want to see a redirect in the google forum.

Also, in your usercp, you can see which threads you subscribed to. This makes it easy to see what discussions you are apart of (and you don't lose the threads).