Rankings went UP for 3 days, then back down

[carpediem]

Hi all,

ok... my site is about 10 months old now....

According to Yahoo site explorer I have about 3,200 backlinks...
althought I have some sitewides (like forum signatures in several
forums).... But aso I have backlinks from all over the place (article
dirs, web dirs etc...). I have aboout 15 live articles on Ezine
articles (plus more to come).

According to Google I have all my pages indexed.

Now about month and half ago, I bought that "seo hosting" package: 5 C
class IPs... On each one of them I installed wordpress blogs... and I
started submitting original content on each blog every 2-3 days....

In every blog post I would put 2-3 backlinks to my innerpages of my
main site and I also put a link to some authority site in that niche. When I started doing that, my main site suddenly jumped UP in SERPS... I was ranking high (1st and 2nd page ) for many KWs... and that lasted for 3 or 4 days... After that it went back to normal and my traffic got back low again (20-30 uniques a day)..

and still my traffic on my site is like that, very small.... I am
surprised that it's taking me this long to achieve higher rankings,
because with my first site (different niche but also competetive), I was able to start ranking high in like 4 months.

Do you have any suggestions for me? Do you think I should remove
those backlinks from those 5 blogs or not?

should I remove sitewides from forum signatures?

or do you think they are checking my Trust rank, because I obviously
have good rank factors (main page is PR3, several inner pages have good PR as well) ?

Thanks in advance,

[tedster]

Sounds to me like any value from those backlinks was very short lived - just nullified within days. i've seen that happening more and more recently. Some links grow in power over time and others, especially social media links, tend to be like a snowflake in July.

I also think that five new blogs launched at one time are very likely not to be "real" blogs unless you have hired a staff of writers. If those blogs are real and are not just in place to increase rankings, then by all means continue to persue your business.

All that apparently happened was the new links lost power. Either that or the short term increase in ranking was unrelated and just coincidental - and that certainly happens with all the constant tweaking of the algo these days.

[carpediem]

There's another interesting thing: I have that "hittail" tracker installed, so I can see real-time search hits to my site.

Just few minutes ago I saw someone came from google search result page 16 ... Then I clicked and did EXACT same google search and I couldn't saee my site on the search results on the 16th page.

So it seems to me that my site is going up and down in SERPS for some reason....

another interesting thing is that I have many visits from google image search results.

[ZydoSEO]

You won't necessarily see the same SERPs as someone else due to geotargeting and lots of other factors. So I wouldn't count on being able to reproduce what hittail is reporting in lots of cases. Hell, half the time I will run the same query within a few minutes of one another and get differences on page 1.

[edited by: ZydoSEO at 8:23 pm (utc) on Dec. 9, 2008]

[lufc1955]

Maybe Google thinks that a 10 month old site with 3,200 backlinks is not natural !

[carpediem]

as I said, I have sitewides , for example from one forum signature where I have about 1800 posts... it is unrelated forum, I put those links there since the begining of my site, so I don't think that might be the issue.... but who knows.

[Shaddows]

I'll second Tedster. Blogs and social media links (in my experience, YMMV) are nice and potent, but short lived.

And I suspect signiture links are incrementally less valuable (they will be identical in structure so easily ...er... identified) . So, your first X number of sigs give you a great boost, which fades. Then more recent sigs give you less of a boost, which also fades. Very recent sigs give you negligible boost, and as the other value fades, you are left with very little.

From G's point of veiw, this lets them put 'fads' at the top of their listing, but drop them down over time as interest fades.

All you have to do now is work on proper, quality, long lived, authoritative one way inbounds from editorial content with varied anchor text, with target distributed across home page and pillar pages. Easy:)

[carpediem]

Do you think I should put domain whois data to private whois guard ? (for my main site I'm talking about) RIght now I have my own real details. At first it was whois guard ON, then I put my real details...

But you see, I have another site (totally different niche, ranks very well) with my same details.....

and those 2 sites are on same server (my VPS, same IP).

[tedster]

Given what you say, Google already knows that you own both sites. That means the current SERPs have integrated that bit of information. Adding privacy guard at this point would be something you might do for other purposes, but not to help your Google rankings

[carpediem]

Yes, that's what I was thinking, too... I shouldn't have changed whois data in the first place but oh well...

I guess if I change whois data now, that might mean I sold website to someone or something like that.

But I mean there's nothing wrong if one person has 2 websites on same server; sites in totally different niches and each site with its own backlinks.

[carpediem]

btw is this a good practice: on each page on my site I put 1 intext link to some authority site in my niche (related to content of that page), and also I have 1-2 links to my other inner pages on my site?

I mean it adds to good user experience, but I don't know if I do it on every page, that G might think I am trying to rank too fast in SERPs.

[tedster]

If the outbound links are useful for your users, I'd have no concerns. I have some clients who do something like that and there's been no issue. Outbound links are not a strong signal for ranking at any rate - I doubt that Google would see it as an attempt to rank faster.

[edited by: tedster at 5:54 am (utc) on Dec. 11, 2008]

[carpediem]

btw doesn't G know that you own both sites if you use same Google Analytics account to check stats for those sites?

[tedster]

Sure

[carpediem]

still the same situation.... very low visit from G

I guess what I'm going to do is do 2 things: submit articles to Ezinearticles (I already have like 20 there) with varied anchors AND add 1-2 pages per week to my main website.

any other suggestions? Besides waiting... since this might be all related to website aging factor.

[carpediem]

hmm this is really interesting....

My site got UP in ranking again for like 2-3 days... it was ranking on 1st page for my many keywords... then I see this morning that my site got down in rankings again....

So the same thing happens to my twice? WHat's going on?

Yes, my site is affiliate site, but it's far from "thin affiliate site"... I mean it really has good content, ofcourse sprinkled with affiliate links.

There's another interesting thing: for affiliate links I just use .htaccess redirect . So I see that G has all my URLs AND affiliate links in index. SO it has about 100 URLs in index, although I actually have about 60 real pages that should be indexed.... Affiliate links shouldn't be in index, no?

Do you think this has something to do with "up/down behaviour"? Do you think I shoould make all my aff urls something like: domain.com/goto/aff-url and then disallow from indexing the whole "goto" directory?

[nealrodriguez]

i know article directory links don't attribute the same link weight that they used to; i went on an article directory submission binge about 2 years ago, and the links weren't even counted in yahoo.

guest posts on relevant sites and blogs in your vertical may be of more assistance. posting link bait on social media can get you hundreds of links, but you have to get enough people to help you promote the story to the homepages and popular sections. the link development forum is a good place for ideas.

[carpediem]

yes but.... what's confusing to me is the fact that twice G let me on the 1st page for my main keywords (very competitive). So I obviously have good ranking factors, it looks to me that they were testing bounce rates and similar things on my site.... Because it's less than 1 year old.

Matter of fact, Feb 1st will be exactly 1 year since the domain was registered, so we'll see.

[tedster]

it looks to me that they were testing bounce rates and similar things on my site

Recently, both John Mueller and Matt Cutts have said that bounce rate is too noisy a signal for Google to use. However, clickthrough rates (compared to some expected value for a given postion) are much more likely to be part of the testing mix.

[carpediem]

Still the same situation... with the fact that it happened one more time in February: G did let my site rank high in SERPS, but this time it was for like 24 hours... and then it put down my site to the bottom of rankings.

it's weird... I am not sure why this is happening....

I am thinking about removing all links from those 5 blogs that I have on multiple C class IPs...

Do you think I should remove those links completely or put nofollow on those links? I am thinking about removing those links completely and then wait and see what happens next.

btw couple of days ago was PR update? Now I see that only my index page kept its PR... ALL other pages have gray PR on pr toolbar.

My site IS in G index.

[tedster]

It sounds almost like a once-in-a-while test. I wonder if that's a more common thing than we know. Google could do something with statistics to identify sites that might perform and give them the occasional better chance in the SERPs.

The SERPs show all kinds of churn these days, and some kind of statistical sampling might account for at least part of it.

[carpediem]

ok I removed all the backlinks from those 5 blogs on different C class IPs. the way I see it is that my situation cannot be worse than it is now with this site, so ... I mean I don't have anything to lose.

also those backlinks could have been counted as "paid links" as they appeared in the same time on all those newly established niche blogs.

Let's see what happens now... The site is more than a year old now.