Something pretty strange - natural link explosion followed by supplementals?

[davidgid]

I had something pretty strange happen to my site, and I would be interested in getting some feed back.

On April 1st my personal blog was used in a political April fools joke. The April fools joke made it on Fox News, several news papers, and the post got linked to from 200 sites. In that 200 there were 3 or 4 PR7 sites, a bunch of PR6 sites and the rest were between PR0 and PR5.

The strange thing was that last week all but a handful of the pages on my site went supplemental. What was worse than that was that I had 50% of my pages that were dropped from the index. Even now I have a ton of pages that are no longer in the google index. Though, pages look to be slowly coming back.

What gives? Do you think that google thought I was spamming because of the massive amount of inbounds I received?

[davidgid]

Oh yeah, one more thing. The one page that was used in the prank never dropped from the index nor did it go supplemental. It seems like google should have dropped that page and not the pages which were not receiving backlinks.

[trinorthlighting]

googlebomb

[martinibuster]

You didn't mention if there has been a change in your traffic from Google. Change or no change?

[davidgid]

Yes there was\is a change in traffic from google. It is down. I no longer rank for some of the terms i use to rank for because those pages are no longer indexed.

[trakkerguy]

Seems strange, but I don't see how it can be determined the two are related. Massive numbers of pages have been going supplemental lately, and may be coincidence that yours did a few weeks after the link/traffic spike.
The page that got all the links might have ended up supplemental as well if not for the explosion.

[suggy]

As trakkerguy says, a mere coincidence. The supplemental index's appetite is voracious at the moment.

[decaff]

sounds like you tripped some filters..

if your blog was relatively new...then this could be the case..
if it was has been around for several years...then the spike in traffic could have been interpreted as an attempt to SPAM (with inbounds)

[kidder]

I agree with decaff - Google respnds badly to spikes these days, that is unless your years old with a ton of trust..

[davidgid]

Interesting. I naturally pick up 3 or so backlinks a month just blogging about my life. My blog is about four years old, and has a PR4.

[Miamacs]

Yes, probably an excessively repeated anchor text.
Or a coincidence.

But if not, another explanation could be this...

Didn't your content - as a byproduct of the visitor boom - end up on a lot of other sites quoting yours? If any of those has higher trust, your own entry ( which was the homepage at that time if I understand correctly ) might have been seen as duplicate. Links could not have saved it either, not that fast.

[activeco]

It seems like Google checks the traffic on a site in a relative way.
If the clicks (from search results) to other pages were substantially lower then the most clicked ones, the other pages go supplemental.

This is not a confirmation, just a suspicion.

[errorsamac]

A similar thing happened to me on my website (See my post on Google-Bowling Static Websites). I was obtaining a ton of new links (from some legit and some spam sources) to a small website (under 200 pages) that did not change at all. After a while it seems like I tripped a filter and now my rankings have tanked. Also note, none of my pages are listed as Supplemental - they just do not rank like they used to.

My question is, what is preventing someone else from doing this to my site and taking me out of the rankings? If you look at davidgid's case, he has no control over who links to him and now his site is suffering because of the "link spam".

[trakkerguy]

You don't know that his site is suffering due to "link spam"

[kidder]

Massive amounts of inbound links? yeah it's a pretty safe bet a filter has been triggered.

[errorsamac]

kidder - So is it safe to say, you could take down any non-authority website that you wanted by just getting tons of spam links pointed at them? If so, it sounds like an easy way to prevent new competitors from getting into your targeted keywords.

[davidgid]

In using the site: command on my site, I am now down to 205 pages out of 350 being indexed. It is strange because some new pages are dropping out while others are being picked up.

As far as spamming a competitor I am not sure how you would do that. The one or two pages that were heavily linked to have performed very well.