Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Of course, after just a few weeks, the site practically vanished from Google and site traffic decreased by half, and I immediately removed the links from the forums. If I Google the URL, the first result is just a title and the description isn't available. If I repeat the search with omissions, the individual pages for the site don't show up until page three of the results. So while every page is still indexed in Google, they are all pushed back to page five or worse when I do a search for keywords related to each page.
The site has been picked up dozens of natural backlinks that I didn't solicit so far. So should I simply start fresh with a new domain name and avoid linking from forums, or is there a way that I can restore Google's faith in the site?
The site has been picked up dozens of natural backlinks that I didn't solicit so far.
Your best strategy is to keep doing whatever is earning you those natural backlinks.
Your ups and downs sound pretty normal for a young site. It would be a step backward to switch to a different domain, with nothing to gain that I can see. Keep your vision and stay the course with your present domain.
If your site is new, this is very common. You have taken all the right steps already to ensure your site's future success.
What you are seeing is a new site going through growing pains. I know this because Google has done the exact same thing to my site as it has with yours.
Your site will be unstable for at least a couple of years with some very good traffic one week and then the next 3 or 4 days of bad.
In time google will learn to earn your site's trust and you will then start to see more stable results.
Now a days 3 years is not uncommon. Just keep your site's nose clean and stick to white hat work and you will be fine over time.
On one hand, I don't wan't to accept that it was from forum linking (though we're talking thousands of backlinks all at once), because that would imply that I could kill a competitor's rank just by linking to him in a similar manner. But the timing was too much to ignore.
I'll go ahead and wait things out for a month or two and see if things improve. I just wasn't sure if I was dealing with a lost cause at this point.
I know many say inbound links can't hurt you, otherwise a competitor could. But if its an unestablished site, it seems to happen. And the sabotage issue doesn't apply if it is limited to unestablished sites, as you wouldn't really have "enemies" that would bother a newly emerging site.
I agree with those who suggest it best to leave links in place, just cool it on adding more too fast, add good content and wait it out. Yanking links in and out is a bad sign to G.
I don't wan't to accept that it was from forum linking... because that would imply that I could kill a competitor's rank
It's a common belief around here that Google treats links between various websites within the control of a single entity differently than links from a genuine third party.
That is to say, if Google sees you "unnaturally" linking to your other sites, they may penalize you for trying to manipulate rankings. If another webmaster links to you, the worst Google will do is discount the links.
Or so the story goes.
We observed this during an experiment. When the links were removed, the pages had their PR restored and everything went on as before.
[edited by: Whitey at 7:06 am (utc) on June 20, 2007]
Originally I had figured that Google wouldn't penalize if I had picked up a significant number of inbound links just as long as I wasn't linking back to those sites. The site that was dropped from the SERPs has absolutely no outbound links.
A month or two?
You were getting some awfully good advice. Stable sites take some time. Keep doing what you are doing, but nix the footer links...that is a big no no...and build links to all those internal pages. A site nowadays has to percolate. Google made that plain a while back.
