Infographic rankings has nose dived? Anyone else experienced this recently?

[adamlcasey]

I posted an infographic back in April, 2012 on my company blog. 
I added embed code at the bottom, so people could embed on their websites (not many did that I can tell) I also submitted it to a number of Infographic directories and got links back from around 5-6 of them.

The title of the Infographic is exact match long tail search term.(6 words)

By July it had hit Position 6 in Google.co.uk, where it stayed in the top 10 until December fluctuating between positions 6-9. I haven't done anything else to the post and yet since December it has started to trickle down the rankings, in the past 3 weeks it dropped from 15th on Feb 3rd to 93rd on Feb 17th, then bounced back up to 33rd on the 25th of Feb and has now fallen again to 89th yesterday.

Is this normal or have I been hit with a penalty of some sort?

Not sure if this matters but I have the word infographic at the end of my title??

Also when I run it through OSE I don't see some of the backlinks that I can see from GWT.

[adamlcasey]

Thanks Tom,

I have looked at a number of other pages and it does seem that certain keywords have all dipped around February (some have bounce back to where they were before) However it doesn't seem to be the pages themselves as other keywords for the same page have moved up over this period into position 1.

[TomRayner]

The OSE crawler is a lot smaller than GWT, so some discrepancy is to be expected, I'm afraid.

Have you seen any other rankings of yours fall for different keywords and, primarily, different landing pages? If not, that would pretty much rule out any penalty.

Having said all that, I think your first paragraph provides the reason why your rankings have fallen.

My guess would be (provided that the links haven't been dropped) is that Google has devalued your links from the infographic directories.  Like normal directories, I can't see much of a user benefit at all on a site like this, which makes it a stand-out target for Google to devalue the link.  We've seen recently that Google looks to be heading towards continuous devaluation of links over a number of weeks/months, as reported in this article. I'd go along with this school of thought - for instance, on one site I've seen homepage keywords dropped while the rest of the site was fine - the homepage had a number of directory links which I now believe to be devalued.

Be sure to double check that the links have not simply fallen off and that other pages on your site have not been penalised.  Should you draw a blank there, this is what my semi-educated guess would be - a devaluation of directory style links, resulting in a fall in rankings.