Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
From 1000+, I was able to bring it to #22 position in 6 weeks and now suddently, it disappeared!
I had 4 other phrases as well for which the corresponding pages are now ranking at 180, 1000+, 1000+, 240 positions where as earlier (till last week) they were all on page 2nd and 3rd of Google.
What might have gone wrong ? all this happened suddenly one day last week. I have not over optimized the site, have not got the links from bad sites either. Any idea ?
How were you building links over the last 6 weeks? article submissions? blog comments? social media? directory submissions? A lot of those link building techniques provide a little help making a page rank but their effects are typically short lived.
How many total backlinks do the pages have? What percentage of those are 'natural' links from other sites? What percentage are paid? What percentage are aritcle submissions, blog comments, and social media links? You need to vary your backlink profile so that if the SEs devalue a certain type of link (social media for example) then you don't take a big hit.
How fast were you growing links before starting your link building 6 weeks ago? I would be careful about suddenly adding hundreds of links per week to a site that hasn't received 100 links in the last 3 years. It doesn't look natural.
Lots of things could cause this sudden drop... Hard to say without more details.
I was certainly using all the techniques to build links. The site belongs to ecommerce niche so obviously none of the links are natural but I don't think is a problem. The keywords are not very competitive and I have done such kind of link building before, only this is the first time this has happened. Prior to link building, the site didn't had any links and wasn't ranking anywhere.
also it maybe be one of those roll back periods when data for your sites ranking is rolled back somewhat, which means youll return to your positions if you sit tight.
@martin - Yes, all the pages are indexed
Did you aggressively target a set of key phrases/keywords?
If you kept on getting the same anchor text links without great variation, you're probably hit with a penalty.
This can be a reason. Can you tell me more about such penalty as I can easily imagine people using such sort of penalties to sabotage their competitors websites.
I mentioned this idea in another thread: just as every headache is not a migraine, every ranking drop is not a penalty. After a certain level of repeated anchor text, Google could just "not count" such backlinks. That could cause a ranking drop and still not be a penalty.
Several Google employees have made comments about this over the past few months. They don't want webmasters to get help from backlinks that they control directly, but they also don't want to allow other people to hurt your site's ranking either - and they feel thay have the situation handled. Google is not telling us how they look for that particular footprint, but they are hinting that they have it under control.
If you do a search for allinanchor:keyword, and your site is maybe on page 5 does that mean you can get more backlinks using that keyword and it "will count?"
>>After a certain level of repeated anchor text, Google could just "not count" such backlinks. That could cause a ranking drop and still not be a penalty.
What quantity of link building were you doing ?
