Why Have My Ranking Dropped?

My site is now just over 5months old and it was ranking about 11-12 in serps for my keyword but today its dropped to like 80 for main keyword and all my other keywords have droped a load too.

I have about 35000 links in yahoo and 11000 in altavista, do you think i've obtained too many links too fast because all ive done is submit to article directories and web directories? Or what other explanations are there for this kind of thing?

Thanks in advance

 

New sites tend to receive fluctuations in the rankings.. you can retain your high ranking by making sure there are new pages linking to your site every now and then.

 

Could be a content issue. Its hard to say without the URL.

 

You probably got a google penalty.

 

What kind of content issues are there? i have about 140 pages of quality original info, maybe at most 10 that might be somewhere else on the net that have duplicate content issues.

Im always building links as well, so theres constantly new one way links. its just puzzled me loads, ive had fluctuations before but nothing this big.

I dont really want to show URL sorry for personal reasons, hope you understand.

 

Rankings drop for various reasons, but be patient! I once had a sight drop 10 pages and the next day whooom #1 in a very competitive term

 

If you want me to have a look at it for you, you can send me a private PM with the url.

 

ok say i have been penalized, what can i do now? do i just wait to climb back up the rankings, and how long would it take?

 

i agree with kelouba, it could be a content issue. Your content may have started out as quality original info, but someone may have scraped your content to use it on their site, thereby killing it's uniqueness... i normally check for this on copyscape.com and change my content to fix it..

I hate it when i am referred to as a PEON

 

Thanks for the link to copyscape.com, i didn't know such tools existed!

Il change my content soon as, but i fear its not because of content duplicates because that content has been on for about 4 months now. Would it take that long for google to pick up even after its been indexed for the same amount of time(4months ish)?

 

what i have seen happen to a couple of my sites is as follows...

1. I write unique content on my site and get to the top 10 for my keyword
2. out of the blues.. I drop ranking to page 5-10 from page 1
3. I check copyscape and see there are sites that have scraped my content... one one occassion I saw one of my other sites had content that was very similar as i created it using the first site as a base [I actually caused my own ranking to drop]
4. I proceed to rewrite my content on my site
5. I wait for google to pick up the new changes, as can be seen in the cache
6. My top 10 ranking is back

This might not work in all cases but has worked several times for me.. and is worth checking..

ttmw... your content could be 4 months old and someone could still nick it..

 

ttmw.. let us know if copyscape found any dups

 

ttmw

It sounds like you've acquired too many links too quickly and the links are probably not diverse enough. Your comments about submitting to article and web directories leads me to believe you're not really trying to acquire any natural-looking links from other related websites.

Focus on some better inbound links and you should start seeing some improved rankings.

 

see this link
to make your self comfortable that this fluctuation sometimes was normal.

 

yes it found 10 which i believe is the max without paying. If i make the changes now will it show the changes right away in copyscape or does it do its work using my indexed pages?

surley if this was a punishable offense then i people could just copy their rivals content and bring their rankings down?

ive got links from other sites content, dirs, article dirs, and a few blogs too, is thatwhat you mean by natural looking links?

ps thanks for all your feedback so far, keep it coming lol

 

maybe one of the reason why your rankings dropped is relevancy of your content and you no longer update your site..remember that search engines love hot topics or recent news and events. If your site doesn't have any latest news or related to recent news, then this has no effect on your rankings. just update your site regularly and post some new and interesting content..

 

alot of factors can cause this:

major changes to your site
competitors outranked you
google just decided to rotate rankings

 

It just took another turn for the worst and is now about 900th but stil moving around getting generally further away from page one. And i just looked on google webmaster tools and only 50% of my pages are indexed when they were all indexed before. they still all show up for site:www.mysite.com in G tho. Has this happened to anyone before, and will it get better?

 

You want a good reason...
its possible that most of the backlinks you are getting have lost some juice..
for example, lets say you are getting a backlink from a pr 3 page that had 5 external links, now it might have 10, so you just lost some juice, and this lose can built up -_-

i hope you get what i mean

 

Google dance starts