Hi, I have a site that has fallen from page 2 to page 11 for my most important keyword on Google in the last 18 months. It's pr4 and has a fair bit of content + it is a shopping cart with over 1000 unique products not listed anywhere else. The funny thing is it ranks really well (page 1 google) for plenty of other niche keywords, just not the one i consider the most important. The only thing i can think of for the drop is that Google didn't like some of the directories i joined that required a payment. And maybe the anchor text was often the keyword I consider important. Do you think this is possible? I joined about 8-10 directories in one go and some of them are now showing no PR at all, others 2-3. Could this be the reason for my poor rankings on one particular term? If there is a penalty and i remove the links to those directories, do i need to do anything or notify Google or will the penalty drop once they realise I don't link there any more? Many thanks in advance for your help.
no it will not happen because of paid directories. If you get more backlinks at a time means then google will penalize so slow backlinks is the best process
I doubt it is the directory listings. Did you change anything on your site right before the ranking change? I've seen the behavior you mention (being listed about 70 to 150 and bounce around a lot) happen for keywords where I have good links and high PR, but something was wrong with the page. On one page where I'd written some content with keywords in it in addition to the content that was already there this happened. So I took off the additional text and after about 6 weeks I was ranking on page 1 of Google. So take a look at your pages and make sure you aren't keyword stuffing.