Will links alone fix my situation?

[beer234]

For the past six months i've had great position in MSN and Google as in first 10 results for some relatively obscure pages. Within the past two days 50-100 of my pages have gone from first page to page 3-4 in Google and thus my revenue has been halved. I feel that the on page optimization was good hence my previous success with virtually every page I created. Where I severly was complacent was link building, I did none except from my own sites and whatever was linked due to articles I submitted to articlecity. My question is do you think going hard on the links will fix the problem? I've purchased a few PR 7 links and PR 6 links and started working hot and heavy to exchange PR4 links with relavant sites. I feel I concentrated too heavily on cranking out content and way too little on link building. Any feedback or predictions would be VERY much appreciated. BTW: despite my Google folly I still rank excellent in MSN so I feel my pages are not needing much tweaking but if you feel that it may be needed feel free to say so.

Thanks
John

[tahiti]

John,

You said you were once ranked high on Google, have you ever think of the reason why you are not by now?
Did you made some major changes to your site, ie. keyword spamming, keyword density, duplication of your own content, ____(fill in with other black hat skills).

[My question is do you think going hard on the links will fix the problem?]
-- YES, DEFINATELY! do it with a long term plan at mind as most probably you will be only seeing the effects after six months. Consider all the details like link age, anchor text, as well the relation of link partners with your site theme.

[I've purchased a few PR 7 links and PR 6 links and started working hot and heavy to exchange PR4 links with relavant sites. ]
-- Some suggest link buying is the best approach. but NOT for me. No point to put your link on someone's page just because of it has a wide green bar. when doing linkings, think traffic and your search rankings, NOT PR!

Hope my idea helps. Good luck!

[Pico_Train]

Build links over the coming months from site with related topics and good content. Look for good results in the SERPs for pages using similar or like keywords as your own.

Time and patience are key.

[beer234]

Thanks for the replies. Nothing black hat on my site, i've been reading that this has occurred to many others this week as Google works through their update. My PR has been all over the map as well. The only thing I have that some are saying may be targeted in this update is pop under ads that use iframe. Though I have another domain that now ranks #1 that uses the same ads so who knows. I'll use the time to build long term links and create more content and see how all this shakes out.

[AnonyMouse]

Are the new SERPS showing on Google.com yet? I'm out of the loop on data center watching, are there any up-to-date dance tools out there? And some clues as to which data centers are worth watching, if at all? Or is it better to keep head down until it's all over?!?

[bether2]

beer234, if you check the Update Bourbon thread, you'll see that a lot of us are experiencing something similar to what you are.

My question is do you think going hard on the links will fix the problem?

I personally don't think so. It might help, but if google sees a big spike in the number of links over a short period of time, that might do more harm than good.

Like Pico_Train said: time and patience.

And some clues as to which data centers are worth watching, if at all?

Check the last two or three pages of the official update thread. There are some data centers mentioned there.

Or is it better to keep head down until it's all over?!?

If you can, that's usually the least stressful way to go. I'm trying to. :)