Search term specific penalties

One of my sites had a page that was sitting at #1 for a term and #6 for the more competitive version of the search term. Over the past week it has just dropped out of the index for these terms - the page is still indexed and still receives traffic for related terms so it sounds to me like a term-specific penalty.

I actually know exactly why this has happened - it's because of an unnatural anchor text profile that is the result of some lazy link building last year (to be honest i'm surprised I got away with it for this long!).

I'm going to assume it's algorithmic for now (rather than manual) and I'm trying to figure out the best way to fix it. Is the most efficient (and fastest) way to drip feed new (clean) links to the page? Or try and have old links changed? Or have the old links dropped?

I'm keen to hear from anyone with experience of recovering from this kind of penalty!

I wouldn't worry just yet, give a couple of weeks, it might just be a bounce. has it only dropped for those 2 phrases? how many positions has it dropped?

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Originally Posted by thebookiesoffers

I wouldn't worry just yet, give a couple of weeks, it might just be a bounce. has it only dropped for those 2 phrases? how many positions has it dropped?

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The page isn't in the top 100 for either term, so I'm assuming its out completely for those terms. Sounds like a penalty, especially as the terms that the page no longer ranks for are the terms used in the anchor text pointing at the page.

how many links were pointing to it?

im going pub in a bit so probably won't see the reply so i'll guess and tell you what I would do

first, leave it for 2 weeks, don't do anything.

if then nothing has returned if the page is 'over optimised' for the phrase just blunt it down a bit. Also try and change half of the link anchors to a more natural looking one. then get a few more new natural looking links

Now wait a minute thebookiesoffers.....if you are going to the pub you should have at least offered to buy baldy a pint while discussing his problem....:cheers:

I think you may need to take a varied approach and try to add a few links with similar terms over time and possibly also get a few of the links you feel may be hurting or damaging the rank on those terms changed or removed.

If the drop you speak of is very recent, it may be a good idea to wait it out a week or two first.....

Interesting problem and I would like to hear more thoughts as well as the answers to the above...# of links etc... also the time frame the links you think are affecting the serps were added etc...

Rick
Universal4

I read in other forums not related to gambling that some sites dropped in Serps, I think it may be a little algo tweak. I think the best option right now is wait to see what happens. I read from someone that he made some backlinking and recover some of the kw, that can be another option.

This may just tells Google users that G has always been trying something to make their search results "better". What is "better"? Google want to expend their advertising on some of their social media sites (Youtube, G+, etc). Is this the reason why they rank the SERPs more on the social sites?

If you want to buy medicine, the pharmacy or drugstore is the place where Google should guide the users to. What's the point to lead visitors to Youtube or Facebook pages?

We don't know what Google will do next. So maybe you should do nothing else except usual update.

this could also be a filter which is like a penalty.

Thanks for the responses guys. I'm 99% sure it's some kind of penalty or filter rather than just a change in the big G's algorithm, especially considering the terms that the page has dropped out of the serps for are the exact same ones pointing to the page. And we're talking #1 to zip/nadda/goneskis, not just moving down a few pages.

According to opensiteexplorer there are just under 40 external links pointing to the page. But the problem could be that 30 of them have the same anchor - oops. This wasn't intentional, it just kind of happened for reasons I wont go into here... I'll drip feed some links and also add some additional content to the page to dilute the KW density and also beef the page out a bit with more content - hoping the fresh content might also help.

Will keep you updated as to how it goes! My other idea was to replicate the page with some fresh content on a new URL (easy to do), return a 404 for the old url and start from scratch with it. But I'll save this for a last resort.

Ps. Thanks for looking out for my beer consuption, Rick! :)

I agree with you. One of my sites http://iddaalar.com has just made that activity. Fist page then 7-8th page positions and then back to first page..repeated many times. The best thing to do is DOING NOTHING. Believe me. Because one of my other site http://superbahiscanli.com did the same and i tried to optimize it but the things got worser and worser and for 3 months i could not get the same results