Negative SEO and big decrease in main keyword ranking

[masoudfatemi]

Hi

about 4 months ago, I had ranking #1 to #4 for "SEO" in Persian in my country; but someone made about 1000 spam links to my site and some other industry sites. I disavowed the links when I see (after 2-3 days of OSE detection). But now I'm in the page 2 of rankings for the most important keyword I ever had.

The point is, My visits increased in this months, but I lost my rankings for this keyword not others. The spammy links targeted my main keyword.

Whats you idea to get my ranking back? I'm writing content about SEO, Marketing and blogging for about 4 years and I don't have any bad resume in buying links or stuffing keywords or ... All natural.

[Dr-Pete]

Unfortunately, these situations can be very difficult to diagnose without a ton of details. I will say this, though, and I know it's a hard thing for many people to hear. Negative SEO is very rarely effective unless there's already an underlying problem. It may not be a deliberate ("blackhat" SEO) kind of thing, but for a negative SEO attempt to succeed it could mean that:

(1) There were issues with your link profile you are unaware of. This could even be a handful of links that violate a specific guideline and that are easy to overlook. Remember, it's about Google's perception of quality, not yours (and their perception wins).

(2) There's some technical issue (say a crawl issue or large-scale duplicate content) that's make you more vulnerable.

(3) There's a content quality issue on some part of the site that's harming the rest of the site.

Dig deep, because it's easy to see some errant 3rd-party links and assume that's the entire problem but in 95%+ of cases, it isn't.

If it's really 100% bad links from someone else, disavowing and requesting reconsideration are about your only option, Unfortunately, if it's Penguin, then you have to wait for an update in most cases, and we're many months since the last one. In most cases, though, it's a combination of factors, and you may have control over some of them.

[masoudfatemi]

Yes we have a great decrease in bounce rate cause of introducing our new community page.

All of other competitors bought backlinks, but ours is natural. I never bought links for myself or clients. Now I don't know how to compete with this kinda backlink profiles.

[George.Fanucci]

Just one factor out of many, but if something as insignificant as the bounce-rate for that URL for your specific search term being higher than another URLs bounce rate... is an example of how dynamic the SERPs can be.

If I click on yours, and go immediately back to Google SERP page, and then click on another URL... and this happens thousands of times could that impact your SERP position next month?

Was there a change in your bounce rate during the period?

[masoudfatemi]

I know things you said George; All of other keywords are growing and our organic visits increased by 30% in the last months. Just this keyword felt down!

[George.Fanucci]

SEO does not exist in isolation. Your actions and your competitors actions are concurrent. Perhaps a competitor has improved their (on-page and/or off-page) SEO more than you did in the same time-frame? Don't assume that negative SEO is the only effect. There are many things happening simultaneously and in many places.

Did their backlink profile change? Did their content change? Did yours? Were there any algorithm changes? There could be many, many factors to consider in detail when trying to understand reasons for any ranking changes, positive and negative.

[masoudfatemi]

Hi bruce,

thanks for your comment;

I should explain something:

• we have over than 200 quality content about our topics
• we are writing contents
• our community page generate contents, too
• all of our links are natural, but competitors bought links and has lots of low quality
• we work on our performance, monitoring and ..

I don't know why we should rank lower than other SEO agency who completely bought links for their site and I don't know how customers accept this and work with them!

[BruceA]

Have you checked that the competition for these keywords?  When we are at the top it is harder to stay there as everyone else is working on getting to the top too.

It is also worth checking if you have added fresh content to these pages too, as Google knows how often to crawl, so if you are not adding freshness, it might be that your competition are adding regular content and are being crawled more often and therefore are taking some of your ranking places.

In the past few month Google has also rollout out new algorythms so it might also be worth seeing if these reductions are aligned to any of these.  Check the Moz Weather map for specific dates.

Worth checking other competitors pages and also how the whole page is performing with Moz Page Grader.