In the last few years I've become somewhat accustomed to working with large, well established sites for big brands. However, I recently embarked on a personal project with a brand new site and whilst things haven't been too bad, things appear to be moving in the wrong direction. Let me give you some background. The site went live on March 16. In terms of the industry I'm competing in, if I were to grade competetiveness out of 10 it'd be somewhere in the region of 5/6. So not mega-competetive, but there is a degree of competition, much with clear SEO initiatives in place including paid links. My site is around 4,000 pages of unique content, 3,600 of which have been indexed within 2 months (most of this was within month 1, there has been little progress since in this respect). I would say I have four levels of keywords I'm targeting: Highly Generic Somewhat Generic Longtail Very Longtail Initially, I ranked on the first page for most 'Very Longtail' and some 'Longtail'. I ranked on pages 3 - 5 for 'Somewhat Generic' and page 10+ for 'Highly Generic'. I was happy with this, as I appreciate that I cannot expect a new site to rank well for generic terms within a few weeks. I did however, expect improvements as my on-page optimisation (if I do say so myself) is 99% nailed on and I've acquired a range of quality links. To demonstrate, my links breakdown as follows (all genuine): - PR7 - 1 - PR6 - 3 - PR5 - 11 - PR4 - 12 - PR3 - 9 - PR2 - 4 - PR1 - 3 - PR0 - 318 My site's homepage is now PR4, which is higher than some of the site's on Page 1 of the SERPS for the 'Highly Generic' terms. However, I've seen a real dip in rankings. In many cases, where I was on page 1 I'm no longer in the top 50, and some of the volume terms I was targeting are now floating around Page 10. I'm still getting traffic (around 1,000 uniques / month) through the very longtail terms, but it's not enough to make my business 'work'. Basically, I'm trying to find a logical reason to the following question: Q. Why would my site rank reasonably in the first instance, then after acquiring some quality, genuine links dip significantly even for low-competition terms? These are my possible answers: - I'm suffering a strange, unpredictable penalty for having some high PR links despite being only a new site - I'm suffering a strange, unpredictable penalty simply for being a new site - My links 'kicked-in' originally, but have now been temporarily devalued as an anti-paid link measure These are the only logical explanations I can think of. Can anyone shed any light? Many thanks (and apologies for the essay)
"Why would my site rank reasonably in the first instance, then after acquiring some quality, genuine links dip significantly" Google give a New Content Boost to new pages and new sites, this boost helps them rank high in search results. But this boost is only temporary. I guess your site also had that boost for some time. Wait and keep building backlinks, to get a stable position in search results, you will need to wait and have lots of backlinks.
I'd opt for the new content boost that disappeared now, too. But it looks like Google is performing or has performed an algo change. Can see lots of changes for 2 word search terms (may be temporary). Long tail search terms seem to be less affected.