jdMorgan - 2:28 am on Aug 28, 2007 (gmt 0)

Possibly too many links all at once in too short a period, identical link-text, and a site redesign to boot. If those 40 new links make up 50% of all your links, then that would certainly register on Googlebot's radar.

Your analysis time-frame is also far too short; Many of these changes won't fully manifest themselves in search results for months. For example, the little green PageRank bar in the Google Toolbar often takes 90 days and more to reflect any changes; It's updated very infrequently. And PageRank is a pretty useless metric anyway -- Not that more is not better, it's just not a useful metric.

Nonetheless, folks tweak a site on Monday, and from Tuesday onward are checking that TBPR every day -- After several months, I'd imagine it gets rather tedious.

Diversify your link text: Consider synonyms and semantically-related phrases. Go slow and steady. Work on improving your site with an eye toward earning unsolicited links from authority sites for the next 90 days to six months, then check the results and let us know how you're doing. ;)

Some folks already have really great sites, and yet are impatiently focused on seeing instant results; To them, I recommend a long vacation in a place with no internet service available. Otherwise, they're likely to obsess on their sites, and tweak them into oblivion. In this business, patience is worth a lot. If you've only got one site to experiment with, then gaining useful data can take years... And by then, the resulting conclusions may no longer hold true.

Best,
Jim