Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I bought around 30 links from a network of web directories 3 days back which were not inter-linked, nor on same class C ip.
Upon researching those web directories further i found those were completely similar to each other in terms of content, meta, descriptions, usability, etc. and includes a few pharmacy and adult links as well.
This site was one of my main adsense earning site (almost 85% of revenue).
What should i do at the earliest to get back on top? even searching for my domain name gets me on +60th results.
Thanks
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:46 pm (utc) on June 19, 2007]
But what about the "search phrase penalties", is it an illusion?
This very famous forum selling links on their pr9 homepage, I did just a quick check, I don't think all the buyers have much benefit from the anchor text used there.
Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank
When I read that, specially the "schemes" site, I really don't think in directories. I think they refer to those places in which you can get an instant 200 back links by placing a piece of code in your website and creating a sort of directory-exchange, or link-scheme, which really, looks shady.
There is no way they can tell who did what. So you are saying that I can take your site down by linking to it from bad neighborhoods or by buying links for it?
Thorough testing was done, down to arriving at a specific percentage at which a penalty was triggered. Done, I might add, by a very reliable party, among the few who could truly be considered "expert" on things Google.
However that's entirely beside the point and anything further would be anti-productive. The investigative process includes questioning and examining all possibilities, and aggressively combatant parries aren't part of that process.
Moving along, whether or not those directories are sending traffic is irrelevant, being something that takes time to measure, aside from which this is not a hearing on defining "best practices" it's about uncovering the possible causes of this kind of a serious penalty or rankings drop.
...hit by -50 penalty (starting 12 hours back).
...around 30 links from a network of web directories 3 days back
Secondly, that timeframe is awful quick - and sequence of events doesn't always mean one is a consequence of the other.
Hardly 5 pages from those directories which shows my anchor text appears in google index till now (P.S. I have removed them all around 24 hours back).
Traffic is still low, almost 85%+ traffic is gone down, all anchor text phrases appearing in google webmaster tools, urchin and awstats are appearing in 50+ results nerly.
For clarification this is not a MFA site, it is a forum based site, which displays 3 regular adsense units + 1 link unit only to guests. I have disabled advertisements for registered members.
I am unsure why traffic is cutoff (major downside in traffic from atleast 500+ unique visitors every 10 minutes to maximum of 50 visitors now.)
This obviously affects revenue as well.. (one can estimate).
Looking for handy conclusions.
Thanks and Regards once again for all the posts above.
Is it a few of the best search phrases that you lost, or the majority of terms people normally find your site with?
And is there any sitewide cross linking between another site, either reciprocal or 3-way?
@ Marcia, my site is a forum based site exactly using webmasterworld directory/url/topic structure, which does not repeats keyphrases on top or anywhere.
I never link exchanged or bought till my first 30 directory network links.
Like people across world use webmasterworld topics in there posts on other sites/forums similarly my forum topics where used by majority of big sites
example: bbc, yahoo answers, anandtech, tomshardware, dell, apple, etc. support sites.
So all above were 100% natural links.
I have lost all the search terms people used on google search to come to my website......even searching for my domain name gets me on +60th results.
This no trivial thing. Such actions by Google often indicate a serious loss of trust. They can't know for sure that you purchased links, and the worst they've talked about doing in the area of link purchases is not letting the domain that SELLS the links pass backlink influence.
As others have observed, penalizing the target domain of a purchased link would open everyone up to competitive sabotage of the worst kind. Google is not going to do that.
So I really doubt that those links caused your ranking troubles. It must be something much more severe than that. Go back several weeks to several months. Remember anything you have done that might be seen as going against Google's guidelines in a big way.
Also look for any place someone may have have hacked your server and is now doing some parasite hosting there. There were some cases of Minus Thirty where the domain was hosting all kinds of things that the owners weren't aware of. Sometimes the culprit was an employee, and sometimes it was parasite hosting. (And sometimes the owner was up to some tricky manipulations and Google caught it!)
You said it's a forum -- how do your outbound links look from within the posts and their signature files?
With a drop this widespread and severe, even affecting your domain name search, I'd say don't look at the small stuff. Something big is wrong. Find it, fix it, and then use the reinclusion form again (soon to be renamed we hope.)
[edited by: tedster at 2:48 am (utc) on June 22, 2007]
Sometimes a massive inbound link attack by a competitor (I'm talking tens of thousands here) has seemed to create a lower level of ranking trouble in some cases, but not a small handful of bad inbounds.
There are good directories that are out there that people find useful that would benefit a site, then there are thousands of DMOZ type clones out there designed to try to manipulate PR. I am wondering if google saw these "directories" and the links associated out with them as PR manipulation. That is what I am saying. We do not know what those 50 directories are so it would be hard to really tell.
I've never seen anything make any difference, in under a couple of weeks.
Google simply will not let changes happen like this, otherwise webmasters could try something, see a result quickly, and then factor it into their SEO.
I think:-
1. Paid links NEVER harm, they are only ever discounted, as said by others, too easy to sabotage another's site otherwise.
2. If you are buying links, likely you've also overomptimsied, and been busted for that, or had some other links you got ages ago, devalued.
cause does no equal effect in this case, the effect came too close after your suspected cause.
This is probably more pertinent. If most of these are low quality e.g. Co-op or Link-Vault, _and_ you don't have a proportionate number of high-quality ones, that might trigger a penalty.
Lots of people getting hammered with penalties lately. 50 extra links on top of what you've already got wouldn't matter, _unless_ Google has also compiled a list of cr*p directories, and your appearance in them was the last straw that tripped a filter.
A site submitted to 1200 cr*p directories, with no other decent backlinks, would be an excellent way to identify a cr*p site.
A site that alrady had a goodly number of high-PR, relevant links would shrug it off. The good backlinks would counter the bad.
No evidence exists that same anchors cause problems.
If too many parameters are "too" right, they will hurt you tremendously. For example, if you are getting links with the anchor "purple widgets", and the pages giving you the links have in the title "purple widgets", the H1/2/3 tag contains "purple widgets", and the page has a few instances of "purple widgets", you will be toast.
This way, even if your competitors would want to hurt you, they would have to put in some major effort to get all those above just right.
What should be done to further avoid this problem. <<<<<
I would suggest you make sure that you have weeded out this problem. As Tedster said, you need to go back and go over what you have done. If a significant number of your pages have just gone supplemental...even with the fix in place now...you will have some time til you see a recovery.
Just make sure you did a proper fix.
I just watched someone's site that was ranking in the top ten for years drop down to #76 for the primary phrase (rankings for the two main phrases were lost) - and it's holding steady there. It's highly unlikely that the person did directory submissions
I own a fairly authority site that took a sudden drop of about 50 places. Today.
Backlinks results
link:example.com gives 0 results
link:www.example.com gives 56 results
link: example.com gives 624 results
I have bought no ads for my site and have done no promotion. The only thing that was done was to remove some pages (on the server and in Google) which were supplemental and not really of any great importance. That was done about 3-6 months ago. It was earning in excess of $100 per day and has now dropped to about $10. But it's just normal Google ups and downs. Other sites of mine have gone up inexplicably and a much ignored site which was pretty dead has suddenly jumped in traffic and more than making up the earnings gap.
So I really doubt that those links caused your ranking troubles
maybe this is too fast for google to notice and rank, but i have to wonder what else did you do before this? Those 83900 links are way more than enough to do it since I doubt they are non-solicited /exchanged /bought ones
