Competitor got knocked off the SERPs - Theories?

I have a competitor who has been ranked #3 for his main keyword phrase for years.

A week ago he essentially disappeared for the main keyword search, now only showing the https version of his home page at #32. His secondary keyword positions are unchanged.

The fact that he still ranks normally for secondary keywords tells me he is not banned. He's been absent long enough to tell me it's not a Google glitch. There has been no other recent shake-up in the SERPs for the main keyword, other than sites below gained one spot to fill the vacancy.

I'm looking for theories on what happened. My first thought is that he must have lost an inbound link for his main keyword. But if that's the case, then it would mean his entire ranking was due to one link source. That would be strange because even if he now has very weak inbound links, I would expect maybe just a 20 - 30 position drop.

Any ideas? Does Google ban sites for just certain keywords, or is a ban all or nothing?

Ed

Really sorry to not be able to provide evidence, but yes, a single keyword can suffer. An entire pattern of links can be discounted.

I do however know a chap who has tested it by deliberately pointing all his [good] links to one specific word - which dropped drastically from a good position. When he changed them back/removed them the positions returned I 'think' he repeated it - more of an automatic 'filter' than a 'ban'.

Hopefully someone can come up with more specific 'evidence', personally I am 99.9999% sure (I'm sure I have experienced it too - temporarily overdoing something, which, when undone it restored - but can't remember the specific instance!).

Not to worry about "providing evidence" - I'm not one of the people here who creates arguments by demanding evidence. In the SEO world, very little is known fact. Usually the best we can do is make observations and draw reasonable conclusions.

It will be interesting to see if he can undo whatever it was that caused him to drop out. I would think that if an issue with inbound links was suddenly reversed and "fixed", Google would see that as further evidence of link manipulation, or at least as a red flag to do further investigation. Now that Google has expanded their infrastructure to hold even more data about a site, I would expect to see increased responses to SERP manipulation.

Other theories and experience on getting dropped out for just the main keyword phrase?

Ed

Hey Eddy,
Google is not very good at discovering link networks on its own. Generally a competitor is behind the discovery of a manipulative link network. So simply undoing the reason you are filtered will reverse it.

thats interesting as i dropped the other week for one search term and wasnt sure why all the others had shown imporvement yet this one went back words and now its back up could that be because of a link again? like above? we have lost a couple of links according to google yet we have moved up in google serps

Interesting case here. I think this has been discussed a bunch of times around here -- too lazy right now to find the exact threads

The interesting part to me is that this "change" is keyword-specific. If they had lost all (or a majority of their) main terms, then that would be a different story entirely... But this is keyword-specific.

I do, in fact, have data on this exact case. Finding it is another question altogether as it is now 3 years old. But I remember the experiment well. I was able to get one of my sites to lose a very high ranking on a main keyword by over-anchoring. Again, I'm fairly certain it has been discussed here before. In my mind, I've come to believe that, in relation to anchor text in your backlinks, there is a certain pattern or threshold that is considered "natural." If Google see's a major variation from this pattern, then the ranking for that keyword is dropped or severely pushed down (but usually dropped altogether). In other words, if you ran around building links with a single anchor text over and over again, you would initially climb the rankings for that term, but you would eventually be caught by a filter and lose that ranking as those links were discounted entirely...

I spent a GREAT DEAL OF TIME contemplating this experiment I ran in 2007. At the time, I couldn't understand how this filter / penalty could exist because it seemed to me that you could apply it against competitors in an effort to remove them from the SERP. But I ultimately concluded that the penalty was real based on reading here and the following points:

1) You REALLY have to go out of your way to over-anchor. Even a simple set of variations of the core target keyword will avoid this. Also, most sites have their company name or domain name in the top 10 list of anchors. This is a solid signal of natural link acquisition.

2) Nobody in their right mind would try to use this technique against a competitor because: WHAT IF IT DIDN'T WORK? You would have just helped your arch enemy move up to the top. Crap!

3) Google is extremely good at keeping track of when links appeared (temporal consistency). They use the time that a link appeared quite heavily in their consideration of this penalty (and in general). This is why so many people can't understand why links can take so long to have an impact. There is a HUGE difference between when a link is discovered by Google and when it's full weight and impact is applied in the SERP.

So now I'm completely rambling. But in short (HA HA HA), my opinion is that this could very well be caused by over-anchoring.

As always - I stand completely ready to be corrected or flogged as necessary.

Have a great day!

Google now offer for you to report link spam to them.

If the competitor website had been reported for link spamming, then upon review Google would discount all the links deemed to be link spam.

If many of the links contained the keyword he was ranking for then he would drop for this term.

The secondary keywords links may have been obtained by a legit source so they would still count.

Here's an update on the original post:
Competitor is now back in his usual spot.

Because nobody else in the first couple of pages were affected (other than moving up a spot to fill the vacancy), and because only the SERP for his primary keyword phrase was affected (he basically disappeared), I'm inclined to believe he tripped a filter related to specific links and was able to back out the changes that caused it. Basically what purdue512 suggested above.

Now - sites that give out natural links rarely go back and change them. Perhaps drop them, but not change them.

So if Google is paying attention, I would hope this guy's "fix" would raise a red flag and give further evidence that link manipulation is going on.

Overall I'm kind of surprised that one can trip a filter, then back out the change and return to their old position. That would seem to encourage webmasters to push the limits of SEO and when caught, back out the change.

Obviously this is not what Google wants to happen. Or are filters designed for violations where Google can't prove it was you (certain kinds of off-page SEO) vs penalties where Google can prove it was you (certain kinds of on-page SEO).

Ed

Google makes changes daily.

Maybe social search got important and that guy had no social networks linking to him.

What's your evidence for this? 'Not very good'? They've grown leaps and bounds since 2004, and you can never determine the 'cause' behind any link, but with what they're given, and the massive scale of data they sift through, they're doing pretty good.


And the scary part, they're only getting better....