Why did my rankings for a keyword drop?

[CasinoGuide-EU]

Hey. I recently made a change on my website's index and the ranks where flying up very fast and then over a night, my main keyword dropped away and I didn't do anything before the drop. I haven't got any spam reports from webmaster tools either.

[allfreechips]

There are many reasons, you may have got a pop for being new, or google just liked your keyword for a bit. Links to that page using that kw can alter the results good and bad.. there are many reasons but finding the cause is the hard part

[jackpotgenius]

There was a fairly significant google update earlier this month which impacting a lot of sites, around the 10th March 2017 this could have had an impact on your site, from what I can tell the update seems to be related to content and link profiles. Trouble with Mr G. is that he is unpredictable - focus on creating good, unique content and reviewing your links as a starting point.

[hilarryy]

maybe there is something wrong in your website or maybe lack of relativity or content or something, that is why you are facing this problem. so i think you should keep putting good material and content, and build only few links on relative sites.

[casinojuegos]

Fresh content tends to rank better first days, then it goes to the final position after a few days. Maybe that's what caused that.

Also, when there an algo change, Rankings seems to go up/down for some days.

[fctables]

Did you use Xrumer gsa or other blasts?
If yes google run new algorithm and ban auto generated website for your keywords.

[Tadoch]

happened to me recently and I am still figuring out what actually happened. I did not use any illegal methods and the only thing was building very good quality links over a longer period of time

[cacaniqueis]

Google algoritm has been updated few weeks ago, maybe this is a reason.

[ibigbets]

from one of the comment that i read on google-algorithm-update-february-7-2017.
"One of my big news sites was hit around January 24-25, 2017. Dropped at least 30%. It was growing every month for the last two years and was never hit by the animals before.


Last week, I suspected it was the monetization. So I removed almost half the ads (even .js files that weren’t really ads, but were from known ad companies like Tynt).


Then over the last week, all the traffic came back. In my particular case, it was pretty simple and I feel like I lucked out!"

I hope this will help

[fanjuego]

Hey. I recently made a change on my website's index and the ranks where flying up very fast and then over a night, my main keyword dropped away and I didn't do anything before the drop. I haven't got any spam reports from webmaster tools either.

You need to be more specific than "the ranks". What type of keywords dropped, how long have those keywords been ranking and on what position?
If you see that there was a drop in a certain type of keywords that belongs to the same group (synonyms, LSI KWs etc.) my first guess would be that you have over-optimized the anchor text to that page for those keywords, if you are building links this is most likely the case. The solution here is to contact the webmasters again where you have placed the link and ask them to change the anchor text to a more generic one, (click here, brand name etc.)

If you are not doing any link activities I would still suggest you to analyze your backlinkprofile from the latest month to see if someone have over-optimized your site for you (negative SEO) The solution in this case would be to disavow the links that you are not in control over.

On-site wise, as you recently have made some changes to the site I would suggest you to check your robots.txt so you are not blocking googlebot and also check your header so it does not contain a noindex tag.

Are any of the sites from your signature the sites we are discussing? If not please send over the URL and I can take a look for you to see if I can find something problematic.

[Casino Spieler]

You could only guess the reason. Most of all you should test backwards. If you ever pop up again with main keyword is a question of great G.

[RacingJim]

I've been hit with a few keyword specific ranking tanks on the 18th April. From front page rankings (steady for 2 years) to nothingness, as if Google is pruning the tree more with lower performing keywords.
Weird... and a bit scary.

[wonderpunter]

One thing I have noticed about many of the sites bein ghit is that they are all small, and all very similar in content writing stle repeated throughout the site. what do the resilts in the top 10 look like? do they deserve to be there?

[RacingJim]

Those keywords came back after about a week. Some keywords went from number 3-10 down to anything from 42-135 and then back again after a week, some have returned even stronger than their original rankings.

Also one of my sites that seemed to get some kind of hidden algo penalty and dropped dead a couple of years ago has suddenly shown signs of new life.

Google - you're a weirdo.