Weird Ranking Penalty. Any Thoughts?

[dp40oz]

I have a website that was on page 1 for about 5 months. 2 months ago it shot to #3 and held there until about 2 weeks ago when I added a new post it went to #2 and was holding solid. I then added another post or two a few days ago and last night at about 1am Eastern time it fell to #13 for the main keyword and all other keywords it was ranking for have vanished.

Now ive had sites get penalized before but usually they get tossed waayyyy back. This penalty just seems odd. I also don't feel its a natural algo adjustment because ive held strong for so long and my webpage has far more and far superior links then my competition. Also since all other keyword rankings have vanished it feels like a penalty to me. Any thoughts? Anyone experience this sort of penalty?

Oh i'll also add that this keyword is not competitive at all really. So to be ranked #13 would take you about 2 days of SEO.

[RevSEO]

Could be just a normal "dance", but the question is did a post fall off the homepage that had content/keyword density for the keyword that you were ranking for?

That's happened to me before on dormant websites that I had rankings for and then began adding new content too. In order to regain rankings I either moved those posts back to the front page by redesigning the front page layout on Wordpress or added a permanent link from the homepage to the internal post and began an offsite linkbuilding campaign for that one.

[JamesGw]

Is this a blog and are the new posts pushing old content off the page? Your new content could just be less optimized for that particular keyword than the old stuff.

[dburk]

Hi dp40oz,

As the previous 2 replies pointed out this is normal and should be expected of a website that is configured as a conventional blog.

Search engines do not rank websites, they rank web pages. The blog format typically uses the post page as your front page or homepage. As you make new posts you are changing the content of that page which effects the relevancy score that the page ranking is based on.

If you want more stable homepage rankings you can setup a static front page. Or, you could focus on getting your permalinks ranking well and don't pay too much attention to the Post page ranking fluctuations.