Google rankings drop follows minor site-wide change

[Prudence]

Hi everyone

I've just experienced a site-wide rankings drop for an affiliate site I run. Most of the pages were in the top 15 but are currently in the mid-50s. The website was ranked first for its chosen keyword for a year but is now at 51. The content for each page is unique and is between 250-500 words. The site is about three years old.

The only changes I have made involve the text of the affiliate link which is included on every page:

I recently added a "Up to 20% off in [MONTH]" promo to the affiliate link and change it for the new month. E.g. "...in January", "...in February" and so on. This is the only change I've made.

I've checked GWT for changes but nothing. Back links remain the same as does my page rank. There haven't been any hosting problems either.

Does anyone have any ideas about what might be going on? Some advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[edited by: tedster at 2:41 pm (utc) on Mar. 3, 2009]

[darkyl]

So basically you changed the anchor text for all your affiliate "product" links and put the same text in all of them?

[Prudence]

Many thanks for the response darkyl.

The product link anchor text is different for each page and relates to the on-page subject matter. I've just added:
" - Up to 20% off in [Month]" to the end of each one.

[jdMorgan]

So basically, your link-text now changes every month? Or is the "20% Off" part outside of the actually-linked text -- that is, outside of the <a href> tag?

(I don't think G would take it "as a sign of quality" if you changed the link-text every month -- At the very least, they'd have to re-evaluate it for relevancy every time it changed...

Jim

[Prudence]

Yeah, the 20% off snippet is part of the linked text and within the <a href> tag. All that changes is the month though.

Time to remove it perhaps? Just hope it's not symptomatic of something more serious with the site.

[Prudence]

Thanks for the input guys. I've just removed the snippets and will keep you posted as to what happens.

[darkyl]

I think that having identical anchor text (even if not 100% identical) might have been the problem.

Also, as jdMorgan pointed out, anchor text changing every month could cause more problems in the future.

Let us know if the -50 penalty is lifted.

[Prudence]

No rankings change as yet. However site links have just begun to appear in Google results for my domain name keywords (which are the name of my site). Puzzling...