Rank drop and weirdness with first page

Competition will not send you to page 8 from being #3 on first page unless he means someone was doing negative seo. Which is what it seems like. To confirm, look at your latest backlinks in google WMT or any of the other backlinks checker and see if you notice a huge amount of crappy backlinks all of a sudden.

If you don't, did you do anything after you achieved the #3 spot or change anything on-site ?.

Sounds like an algorithm penalising your "first page". If your homepage was ranking on page 1, and is now nowhere - that sounds like an algorithmic penalty. Pages that have been stable for a long time don't just "disappear". They slowly drop down in the rankings - and this drop should be noticeable day-to-day. I'd look through your link profile, on-site optimisation and look to correct things.

Google Webmaster Tools will list any manual actions - so check there. Things to look for on the page in question are:

- Quality of links (blog comments? Web 2.0 spun spam?)
- Keyword optimisation (how high is the keyword % on the text? Try reducing it if over 5%).
- Does the page read naturally and provide engagement/value? (If a manual action is taken, you need to appeal to a human, not a bot).

Take a step back and think, "Would I recommend this page to a friend?". If not, go and fix it so that you would. Far too many people focus on the cash profits, and forget about the long-term.

Are you using a free wordpress theme and where did you download it from?

Obviously, there is something wrong with the Wordpress theme you recently changed.

Wordpress theme has a big effect on rankings because of how each theme is coded.

If the drop is that fast, I would say it's a penalty on your side. I haven't seen a natural drop that fast in my life unless there's a penalty behind it.

I would say, check your SEO the past few months and see what you did wrong. And try to remove those bad links.

If the homepage is gone but there is no manual penalty letter then over-optimization USUALLY causes this. Check your on-page settings and content and see if you are stuffing your keywords too much.

Well, I think the reason behind this drop might because you competitors are gaining over you. They might have done quite a good SEO than you have done, I would say try having a look over to your backlink profile, If this is happening because of the backlink then you are sure going to get you position back by improving your backlink.

You need to update the content of your pages which dropped rankings.

Get comfortable with Google's Disavow Tool.

This smells like negative SEO. Using the Disavow Tool is a pain, but it's a reality of SEO in 2014.

Here's some info on how to defend your site.*

*I'm not affiliated with this site.

Here's some info about that:

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