SERP Rankings Gone Down

What do you mean exactly by this:

"We are using legitimate white hat techniques to get backlinks for the website."

Because you are outranked by LOTS of different sites, it might be better to focus on what YOU are doing instead of what one competitor is doing.

90%+ of the "white hat seo" link building is substandard and can lead to penalties. I'd discontinue the link building and reassess your strategy as Planet13 eluded to.

If someone copied your content, file a dmca notice with their host and request the material be taken down. Your ranks may improve after the offending content is taken off the web.

Check your dates against Google algorithmic changes but it looks like your competitors have simply bought some links so you are left “hoping” a Penguin refresh would kill them off. If you see genuine cases of spam then report to Google using the correct form.

It is not easy to get links these days especially with the destruction of recommended links pages (I thought worked quite well for “like quality” sites); however, in theory there is a level playing field with Penguin as a friend. But I guess Penguin needs to work in real time but can not due to negative SEO. It's a sticky situation.

and they are ranking higher than us

That itself is a major cause for worry. Recently Google is getting better and better at detecting the original source of content and in the few cases I've seen where spammers outrank the content originator, it's either the spammers' website is seen as higher authority than the originator's website, or simply put Google has got it wrong.

In other words, most webmasters needn't worry about spammers scraping their content because their own sites are authoritative enough for the spammers to never outrank them.

First things first - hit the scrapers with DMCA as @mrengine suggested and then look at your website and try to understand what it is that makes Google consider your site low authority.

looks like your competitors have simply bought some links

Yeah, but that doesn't explain such a major drop. If you've got a squeaky-clean "white-hat" site and it drops from 14th to 43rd, that would mean that 29 of you competitors bought links simultaneously and all 29 did it in a fashion that tricked Google into giving them credit for those paid links. It's a virtually impossible scenario.

Yeah, but that doesn't explain such a major drop. If you've got a squeaky-clean "white-hat" site and it drops from 14th to 43rd, that would mean that 29 of you competitors bought links simultaneously and all 29 did it in a fashion that tricked Google into giving them credit for those paid links. It's a virtually impossible scenario.

OK agree; then it is either that you have lost a very valuable link or it is an algorithmic drop that can be identified if you get enough traffic to statistically be accurate against Google algo dates. If you use Google Analytics there is a free "Penguin Tool" to plot against all Google updates.

EDIT: I have white hat site that got hit because one of my editors had published his own articles (with permission) from a newspaper he wrote for. That newspaper a couple of years later publish his articles online and I was Panda hit. Doh!

[edited by: Johan007 at 12:22 pm (utc) on Apr 17, 2015]

Is this an affiliate site?

I know you want to rank higher than all those above you, but do you deserve to?

netmeg... lets presume everyone has quality content. The fact that he works for a small SEO firm as a "Search engine optimizer" and knows very little (dates of algo updates) is of absolutely no concern to me!

So you're a SEO, huh? And you're using white hat techniques to acquire links, right?

Should not you know already why your competitor is out ranking you and how to rank him and dominate the top 3 SERP real estate? You know, because because you're a SEO.

The answer? Links, lot's of links. But not just 'any' type of link. Good awesome hyper duper links that you would cry when you see on WMT that a mega authority site has linked to you. That's the answer right there, my friend. Links.

You know why your competitor out ranks you? Because he has links. But not the super mega awesome links I've describe above. He has the type of links that Google cannot filter with its spam algorithms *yet, or maybe never*. I have heard through the SEO grapevine that they call it "churn & burn".

So you have 2 options:
- Create absolutely beautiful content that would be linked gracefully by Cosmopolitan, CNN, webMD, bb.com (not a forum link please), FOX and a couple more awesome sites that lead the weight loss industry and that aren't part of the 99% of scammers out there creating affiliate sites to sell snake oil and charge credit cards without permission.
OR
- Churn & burn

God speed, my friend. God speed.

lets presume everyone has quality content.

Nope.

netmeg, that is a problem with many of the replies I got with my site. Because we don't post a link people like you are quick to presume I rubbish content. So if your going to question everyone content each time they post a question it is going to get tiresome here. Stick to the facts.

Everyone thinks their site is all that, few of them are. Including mine. So I repeat - if you are going to complain about why you lost rank, you better be able to honestly gauge whether or not it deserves to rank.

EDIT: I have white hat site that got hit because one of my editors had published his own articles (with permission) from a newspaper he wrote for. That newspaper a couple of years later publish his articles online and I was Panda hit. Doh!

Well, to be honest I find it hard to believe that a few non-original articles could have Pandalized your site. I know plenty of high-flier bloggers who regularly republish their guest posts on their own blogs and have their posts republished elsewhere. The thing is that the proportion of republished vs. original articles is miniscule and most of them are using the cross-domain canonical tag anyway to tell Google which is the original version of the article.

So, if you are right and republishing this content has really caused Panda to rear its head, you can add canonical tags pointing back to the newspaper and Panda will go away. If it doesn't, there are underlying issues.

When Google encounters two versions of the same content, it will choose which version to show. It's not that it will automatically slap the site hosting the other version with a penalty. Unless, of course, it's maliciously done on a high volume.

You know what, I've never seen a Panda case that's been caused by a few republished articles. I'm not saying I can guarantee this can't happen, just questioning it for a valid reason.

you better be able to honestly gauge whether or not it deserves to rank.

and Amen to that :)

Heh, I think we just hijacked someone's thread!

So if your going to question everyone content each time they post a question it is going to get tiresome here. Stick to the facts

. I tend to side with you on this Johan007. Given the data, lets try to diagnose the problem if it helps the OP.

Site loses ranks and it doesn't rank for its own content. So, the simple question would be -
A. "Did some sort of penalty that made the site lose ranks was responsible for scrapers rank ahead?" OR
B. "Google lost the plot and can't tell the scrapers from the content originator and ranks also were lost as a result?"