Google-Bowling Static Websites

Getting too many inbound links, too fast, similar anchor text

[errorsamac]

One of my websites saw a sudden drop in rankings today. I used to get about 400-500 people coming in from Google everyday, but today I dropped down to 10 people. I believe this is because I was getting many links with similar anchor text from so-so websites (some good sites, some spam sites). The anchor text varied, but ultimately they had the same keywords in them and I received about 300-400 of each variation within a 2 months period. Examples: "Blue Widgets For Your Home", "Widgets For Your Blue Home", "Home Widgets That Are Blue".

Things to note:
- The site's content has not changed at all. No updates to title, meta, body, etc. It's the same static site as it was back in 2006.
- I have been acquiring links from all over the place (including some bad neighborhoods).
- I do not have any links to other websites from my own (I do not link out to anyone).
- I transfered the domain to a different registrar 3 weeks ago (same owner, but I moved from Register.com to GoDaddy). Nameservers, IP, content all stayed the same.

Considering the content of my site hasn't changed since 2006, I am assuming the drop in rankings is related to the new links that I am getting. Lots of new links + no change in content, probably tripped a Google filter.

I always thought that a competitor couldn't do anything to hurt your website rankings. Even though I acquired the links to my website, what is stopping a competitor from doing the same thing to me? If this is true, any relatively static website that is ranking well can be hurt in the SERPs by getting tons of links to them from bad neighborhoods with the same anchor text.

Has anyone else experienced this and what can do you (if anything?) to fix the problem and recover in Google? Short of emailing the people who are linking to me and asking them to stop, I am not sure what to do.

Thanks!

[tedster]

You may not have made any changes on your site, but there's one other moving part in this equation -- Google itself. If you check out these two threads, you'll see lots of mysterious changes in ranking in recent weeks. So the inbound links may not be the issue at all.

Check out:

April 2007 Google SERP Changes [webmasterworld.com]
Signs of Fundamental Change at Google Search [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: tedster at 2:27 am (utc) on April 15, 2007]

[Whitey]

There are also many other "if's" involved.

My hunch is that you may have duplicate content issues and have fired the links in down a secondary path and upset the indexing.

It's worth a check as you audit potential areas. Have look through this post:

[webmasterworld.com...]