Site has lost all rankings, can't work out why
- SEO |
I've been working on an authority site that consists of a blog and a number of permanent pages.
All the content is written by me. It's well-researched, engaging, unique content. Most pages are 800-1500 words. It also has a number of photographs I've taken.
I've slowly been building the content and had made a little headway in the rankings. I haven't really put much effort into link building yet, I wanted to get a solid base of content first.
It had ranked pretty well for a site with very few links. I was tracking about 15 keywords with exact-match searches between 80k and 1k per month.
Here's a selection of how it was ranking:
50k search term - #50 22k search term - #15 7k search term - #8 6.5k search term - #21 4k search term - #25
But around April 6th, all the rankings dropped. Simultaneously, my site dropped out of the top 200 results for all the keywords I was tracking, even the really uncompetitive ones that get less than 1k searches per month.
Here's what webmaster tools shows:
Before then, I was getting around 50 search visitors a day. Now, I'm getting virtually 0.
The drop seems site-wide. However, I have not received any warnings in webmaster tools, and my site still looks healthy: all the pages are still indexed, it's still the #1 result when you search for the site name.
I have no idea what could have caused the sudden drop in rankings.
This site has literally 0 black- or grey-hat SEO. No spammy linkbuilding or anything at all like that.
Here's a list of linking domains from webmaster tools. There's nothing even slightly shady:
I can't think of anything that changed with the site around that time. There was no redesign, no change in hosting, no new links, nothing different.
Only possible thing I can think of: I added an adsense unit to a small number of pages around March 22, and I added a few relevant affiliate links to those same pages. Only for about 10 pages in total, out of 50 or more. But I don't think that could affect rankings?
Can anyone suggest how to move forward? It seems very likely that my site has been hit by some kind of Google penalty, but I don't know what could have caused it so I don't think I can submit a reconsideration request.
What should I do?
I'd be really grateful for help, I've been working extremely hard on this site and I'm really discouraged that it's been slapped like this.
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