I have a page that used to hold steady between the second page of results in Google for certain keywords that has been gradually sinking for the past two weeks. It's now down to the bottom of the fourth page. It's like it's in some kind of freefall. Every time I check, it's a little lower but meanwhile the total number of results for the keyword remains about the same (no major shift). I'm wondering if this is the sign of something obvious that I'm overlooking. I haven't really done anything major to the page. The only thing I've been doing lately is putting links to the page in my signature in forum posts.
A couple of possibilities come to mind immediately. · Your competition has become stiffer. Not more competition necessarily, just that they've been working on improving their sites' lot in life. · The (probably low quality) signature links you've been getting lately are having the effect of watering down your better links. · Some of your inbound links may have been removed or the amount of link popularity they are able to pass may have declined. Either way, you should be able to reverse the trend by spending some time and putting some effort into getting more good quality links from trusted sites pointing to yours.
Boy do I ever! I'm also thinking that my ranking might have been affected by linking out to an affiliate whom I suspect of being a so-called bad neighborhood. (the links have since been removed). Aside from doing a search for a site's domain name and reading up everything you can find about them, how can you determine if a site has been designated as a 'bad neighborhood' by Google?