Ranking oddity - any thoughts?

[Simmo!]

Hi guys,

Not sure if any of you can help me with this one, but I'm a little perplexed.

One of my sites (http://www.onlinecasinouk.com) was ranking fairly well for my target terms "online casino uk" and "casino uk" for a few months since a redesign - first page of Google - along with some good rankings on inner pages for longtail keywords.

On March 5th those main (homepage) terms tanked into the hundreds and have been bouncing around between 400 and 900 on Google ever since. However the longtail terms have either maintained their rankings or risen a little. The main terms also tanked in both Yahoo and Bing to between 100 and 200 at the same time and in Yahoo, they now bounce in and out of the Top 1000, but never higher than about 150.

It seems odd that this slide happened in all 3 search engines at about the same time.

The site has minimal backlinks, no paid ibl's and content is relatively static on the homepage, which is the page that ranked for the main terms.

I looked at my change log and the only thing I can think of that may have affected it is that I added internal links, contextual, back to the homepage of most pages using my target term "online casino uk". At the same time, I added some internal links to the longtail pages, but in every case I made the links not only contextual, but relevant to the content in which it was placed, very much with the user in mind. I also made very similar changes on another site, using the same design, which has had no adverse effect.

Although I am sceptical this is the reason (it has to be unlikely that all 3 search engines would have the same effect at the same time based on this change), I have since removed the contextual homepage backlinks around a week ago to see if this would make a difference, but the rankings for the main terms are still fluctuating in the same range for now.

It seemed more likely that there was a physical problem with the page, so I checked the HTML for errors last week. I found one that affected the layout in Firefox/Chrome substantially - but can't see it would affect rankings dramatically - and can't see anything else obvious. The server hasn't changed, load times haven't been affected. It maybe that those two changes I made in the last week will have an effect given a little patience, but otherwise I'm lost for ideas.

Any thoughts?

Cheers

Simmo!

[elgoog]

using my target term "online casino uk"

in links back to the homepage,
and you did change that back one week ago?

wait one more week.....
also Google is behaving very weird atm

------------------
<meta name="title"
i would get rid of that tag, if it does not harm you...it will never help...

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maybe you should not repeat the same Online Casino UK in the description,
it is already in the title and in H1 and on page


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one syntax mistake on the index
<a href/"online-casinos/best-uk-casino.php">best UK casinos</a>

[Simmo!]

in links back to the homepage,
and you did change that back one week ago?

wait one more week.....
also Google is behaving very weird atm

Yes - just over a week.

maybe you should not repeat the same Online Casino UK in the description,
it is already in the title and in H1 and on page

Google doesn't use the META Desc tag in rankings, but it is an important call to action and having the term Bolded helps so I'd rather keep it - and I use this policy on a lot of sites without detriment.

one syntax mistake on the index
<a href/"online-casinos/best-uk-casino.php">best UK casinos</a>

Thanks Fixed.

Thanks for taking the time Elgoog. Appreciated.

[penny-slot-machines]

Blimey, that sounds really frustrating

Someone I know had this exact same thing happen to one of his sites recently (last month)

The site had been in the top three for it's key phrases for well over a year, but suddenly the homepage dropped to the hundreds. Even if you did a search for exact match text phrases, it wasn't ranking above internal pages. They had been messing around with internal links, url structure etc., but nothing out of the ordinary, all honest white hat stuff

The good news is that the rankings eventually all came back as if by magic, they no idea why, though. So, hopefully this will happen for you...


I just did an advanced (pro) search using SEOmoz tools on your site to see what came up - it didn't spot anything obviously wrong, but it did say that you had a lot of duplicate tags (titles, descriptions) - I don't know if that is the case (they sometimes get it wrong), but maybe worth taking a look at to code of those tags throughout the site?

[Simmo!]

I just did an advanced (pro) search using SEOmoz tools on your site to see what came up - it didn't spot anything obviously wrong, but it did say that you had a lot of duplicate tags (titles, descriptions) - I don't know if that is the case (they sometimes get it wrong), but maybe worth taking a look at to code of those tags throughout the site?

I use standardised Title tags for review pages, like "Betfair casino review" "Bet365 casino review" etc, so it is probably spotting those at a guess PSM. I would have thought that was OK especially in light of the fact that some of those pages continue to rank quite well. But will revisit down the line if no improvements.

Thanks for the time you spent doing that.

Simmo!