Confused (or is it just Google?)

[Online Business Video]

Hi all, I have a question for the seo experts here.

We've got a website that ranks well for various keywords (& phrases), mostly longtail stuff. It's a new site in a competitive field so longtail was the way to go to build up our page numbers over time.

Something strange though has happened that we can't quite work out.
A particular page, which for the past 3 months has been on page 1 has suddenly dropped to page 30. So it's obviously not a site wide panda type spanking, but just this page? The content of this page is definitely comparable and even superior, when compared to many other sites on page 1 , so we're a bit non-plussed as to why G has picked this page out for demotion. There's no bad links pointing to it from what we can gather and it hasn't been changed.

We're a bit concerned that this might be a portent of things to come with the whole site. We very conscious of Google's guidelines and are wary of falling victim to the 'latest G update', so we keep things tidy and play by the rules, but the demotion of this page (after ranking well for so long) and with such a dramatic drop has got me a little worried..

Has anyone else experienced a sudden individual well ranking page drop out of the blue whilst the rest of a site's pages maintain their positions??

Look forward to any feedback.

Cheers
Paul

 

[JonathanSEO]

PM me the site, the page and the keyword and I'll have a look.

I've seen sites jump all over the place so might not be anything to worry about.

 

[mit74]

has anyone copied the page?

 

[MarieHaynes]

Have you been building links to the page? If you have overdone it with anchor text then this can get the page penalized.

I have seen pages jump around for no reason though. I've had some sites where the page dropped down really low and then suddenly resurfaced to appear higher than it originally did. But, I don't think they've ever dropped as low as page 30.

Also, make sure you haven't accidentally noindexed the page or blocked it with robots.txt.

 

[fisicx]

Could just be that Google is having a bad hair day. It happens sometimes. If you don't come back in a day or two then start investigating. Have you got a WMT account? Are there any messages in there about this page?

 

[markrobin]

Have you been building links to the page? If you have overdone it with anchor text then this can get the page penalized.

I have seen pages jump around for no reason though. I've had some sites where the page dropped down really low and then suddenly resurfaced to appear higher than it originally did. But, I don't think they've ever dropped as low as page 30.

Also, make sure you haven't accidentally noindexed the page or blocked it with robots.txt.

I agreed with this, check the whole page content and keyword, check your page anchor text as well.

 

[Online Business Video]

Hi all, thanks for your feedback. No improvement - this page is still languishing in Google's nether regions I'm afraid. Very strange??

Jonathan. sent you a pm.

Paul

 

[WebHandyman]

I too would be interested to be sent a copy of the URL and Keywords you were targeting.

Also, make sure you haven't accidentally noindexed the page or blocked it with robots.txt.

If the page is appearing on page 30 of Google then the page hasn't been blocked through a noindex or robots.txt.

 

[Online Business Video]

Hi all, many thanks for your help and advice, particularly Jonathanseo and Webhandyman - however, still haven't got to the bottom of why the page in question has dropped so far, so quickly - I would imagine it's a combination of things perhaps. We need to look at various angles on this... but it's a bit odd to say the least.
Getting the Big G to love you is a bit of a one way relationship - give a lot to get a little!! Anyway, as once said by someone, " keep calm and don't panic" is the order of the day- we'll keep soldiering on!
Thanks again.

Paul

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Did you make any changes to the internal linking structure? i.e. did you remove any pages with links to this, or remove any links, or even change anchor text for links ointing to the page (internal links)?

 

[Online Business Video]

Hi OWG, no we haven't made any substantive changes recently. We've added a few extra pages, but nothing that does (or should) impact in any way on the subject page. And all the internal links to the page work ok . The only thing I can think of is that there's been a flood of new pages ( with stronger link profiles) that are targeting the same phrase as ours - but that's unlikely I would think. As said before all our other pages have maintained (roughly) their positions - it's just this one page that has been hammered - so still none the wiser!

Paul