I have a website that ranks well for several competitive keywords. Earlier the SERP position was different for different keywords. Now for last few days it has been stuck at position 15 for any keyword I search for. Has my site got any penalty? What may be the possible reasons? Please advise and suggest some tips to improve my ranking. Thanks in advanve.
Don't forget that search engine results you get aren't the same everyone else sees Is your traffic the same? Which site/keywords are it, how much of a difference? I'm assuming if they were competitive keywords & your site was penalized it'd be farther down than #15
I highly doubt your website is penalized. I have never heard of a penalty that drops you back to position #15. More common penalties put you on the 5th or 6th page or even on page #10+. In position 15 you could still get a bit of traffic. If Google wanted to penalize your website, they would push you to a position with no chance of traffic. One thing you have to watch out for when checking rankings is geotargeting and different data centers. Sometimes you will just get results from a different data center and your rankings will all look different than what they previously were. This is because it takes a while for rankings to update across all data centers. You might want to try logging out of your Google account when you are checking rankings too. When you are logged into a Google account, personalized search results could affect what you are seeing.
I think it might be because of google dance. Rankings change for a while when this happens. Also, it could be that you lost some of your backlinks.
You could just send a mail to google i'm sure? And as someone else already said. If they wanted to penalize your site, they wouldn't keep you at #15, but waay down the line.
Your competitors could have done something in the past that has just kicked in that could knock you down, theres too much going on that can influence a change.