Rankings drop - could it be unrequested inbound links?

[wildriver]

Hello everyone,
I am new here and after doing some reading I thought I should get some advice.

I have had a site for over a year and I was doing really well with my keywords, on first page or 2nd.

All of a sudden in the past week or so (maybe longer?) I was nowhere to be found. Occasionally my product pages show up though. But I know that I am indexed on google so I am not banned or anything.

So here is what I just discovered. I have a program i use to set up my site (ecommerce,) and i get a lot of emails saying "link added" which I see in Statcounter are from New Delhi India. So I just delte the email. but when I read the forum I thought I should check out my link page, and there was about 150 links that were "inactive."

Could this be why my SERP has dropped so much? Even though I haven't reciprocated links, they must put mine up or something.

HELP! I am so stressed I can't believe that it dropped so fast & is nowhere to be found!

Thanks!
H

[internetheaven]

If you are now ranking well in Google India but nowhere else then you've found your problem.

[wildriver]

Thanks for the reply!

It doesn't seem I am ranking really at all in Google India.

Also my home page is nowhere to be found on the searches, (is there a way on google webtools to check? It does say that over 100 pages on my site are indexed and I just submitted a sitemap.)

I almost think they just hit those that used to spend a lot of money on advertising and that have stopped due to high serp.

Can someone maybe take a look at my HTML and see if they see any issues?

thanks!
H

[trillianjedi]

I thought I should check out my link page, and there was about 150 links that were "inactive."

Can you explain that further? Do you have a links page on your site that the public can submit links to? What does "inactive" mean?

Here are some threads that you might want to read through in detail:-

A Checklist For Sudden Drops in Rank [webmasterworld.com]
Dropped From Google Checklist [webmasterworld.com]
Dropped Site Checklist [webmasterworld.com]

[wildriver]

Thanks for the links.

Yes it looks like people can submit links but I do not approve them, but apparantly they still show up on my "Links Directory" as iNactive. They can go to my links page and submit them.

I get an email that says "New Link Added," but just ignore them and never realized they were sitting in my directory.

[trillianjedi]

they still show up on my "Links Directory" as iNactive.

View the page having logged out - it's possible that only you can see them (as a site admin).

If you're not using the directory/links section of the site, and are not maintaining or moderating it, I would recommend either removing it completely or clean it up and lock it down (no public submissions).

That's not to say it's what caused your drop in rankings however - could be many things.

[wildriver]

It does look like only I can see them, I was wondering if maybe google could though.

But my idea was that google would see all of these other sites linking to mine that were just junk and that is what did it. Does that make sense?

I know that my drop coincided with a lot of others though as my last index was Sept 4th, then Sept 17th. So now I guess I wont know anything till my next index?

Thanks everyone for the help!

[edited by: tedster at 2:51 pm (utc) on Sep. 22, 2008]