October 2010 ranking drops

[omnibet]

starting with 21 october 2010 i lost some rankings for a few important keywords. my site is still there but dropped a few positions. i observed that only keywords that i was making backlinks went down and all the others are doing well... does anybody know why and what can i do to get my rankings back ?

[HuskyPup]

does anybody know why and what can i do to get my rankings back ?

There are several speculations with people seeing different things, some sites have returned after doing nothing, some have not, I lost thousands of images, most have not returned after being there for 11+ years yet I still rank mostly #1 in the normal SERPs for keyword queries.

[HuskyPup]

Oh...and welcome to WebmasterWorld omnibet:-)

[jimbeetle]

i observed that only keywords that i was making backlinks went down and all the others are doing well

It appears that the biggest factor in the Oct 21-22 fiasco was the downgrading of link juice from certain types of sites. From what I looked at, links from sites whose content was mostly from article directories were hit hard. The trickle down then wiped out a lot of SERP positions.

[omnibet]

so... should i stop building links and go for on-page optimization? i tried changing titles, raise the keyword density, remove H1 tags but nothing yet...

[omnibet]

btw , nice to meet you too HuskyPup :)

[jimbeetle]

should i stop building links and...

That depends on what kind of link building you've been doing. If you've been targeting the low-hanging fruit that doesn't give much in return, then you should rethink your strategy.

... go for on-page optimization? i tried changing titles, raise the keyword density, remove H1 tags but nothing yet...

Content?

[MelissaRWE]

We too noticed a traffic decrease (rather, a decrease in YOY % gain) near the end of Oct. It made for an unpredictable Q4 with only moderate gains which were very disappointing compared to our projections in Q1 and Q2.

omnibet>>> we've done PLENTY of on page SEO. updating titles, rewriting descriptions to up the keyword density, etc. and still we did not see the increase we projected. On another note, why are you 'removing your H1 tags'? I'm no expert, just someone 2 years into the self taught seo game, but doesn't Google want you to have H1 tags, as long as they are done correctly? I was going over Google's SEO starter Guide and reading about H1 tags because our site actually doesn't have H1 or H2 tags... Can someone clear this up for me? Do we need them or don't we? Harmful or helpful?

[tedster]

You don't "need" H tags to rank, but used correctly they are a helpful relevance signal for Google.

[epmaniac]

my site was also hit very hard, it lost 80% of its traffic, we went from being one of the top 4000 sites according to alexa into obscurity... since then i have changed a lot, content and internal linking wise, i am now thinking of reducing bounce rate.... but one question always remains in my mind : IS THERE ANY CHANCE for OCTOBER 21 victims to get back?

[azn romeo 4u]

Wow top 4000 to nothing...that's a huge hit.

[indyank]

I don't think alexa rank is a good traffic indiactor.Sites that add a lot of pages per day usually get a higher alexa rank, though they may not have the traffic.So, don't go by it.

Even here on Webmastersworld, I see the alexa rank drop continuously.

But 80% drop is drastic.Do you see a corresponding alexa ranking drop?

[epmaniac]

yea, we have vanished into obscurity of being not even in "top 100,000" site

[omnibet]

epmaniac: I saw your posts about problems you have and I think the linking strategy is the problem with your site. i`m not saying that you`re a spammer and i don`t even know your site but i think in october, spammers were hit hard by google. same here with my site...i was placing backlinks everywhere , doing manually not using any kind of software, using on most of them same anchor text....

[epmaniac]

i was linking my homepage on few websites (sitewide) PR 8 sites.... could linking only homepage have triggered it?

[MelissaRWE]

I came beack to check on this thread today and it seems that it's sounding more and more like the issues we are having with our site.

I'm curious if our decline in Nov/Dec traffic now has to do with our linking strategies. Most of our backlinks come from forums related to our industry, social shopping/networking sites and a few blogs. We've never used linking software, everything has been manual or organic. Could building our own backlinks this way make Google consider us spammers?

My question now is, what should we do? epmaniac and omnibet, we seem to be having similar issues. What new directions will you be taking in Q1 to combat the decline? For us, if traffic drops any more, by Feb, we will be behind where we were 2 years ago.

epmaniac, good luck with your internal linking strategies. Our site is linked heavily internally and it seems to have done nothing to avoid disaster in 2010.

[MelissaRWE]

just did a search for 'Google updates October 2010' and found this:
[markrushworth.com...]

Speculation that the updates that affected deeplinks actually began on Oct 7th, went back to normal, then happened again around Oct 21/22....

[jimbeetle]

My question now is, what should we do?

Build quality links.
Explore SMM.
Add more quality content.

[brinked]

I will say this again. Google has tweaked or made their over optimization filters more strict. This is not only onsite or offsite, they have a formula for how they decide you are too aggressive targeting a keyword or set of key-phrases and if you trip that filter your rankings will take a dive for those phrases depending how aggressive you have been, this can be a few positions, a few pages or falling off the radar.

Branded links are natural looking links in most cases and that is why google is favoring them. It is so easy for me to spot a paid/suspicious looking link so I have no doubt that google can see this as well and if you have too many sitewide/homepage high pr backlinks for the same set of keywords, guess what? You may very well have been hit.

[martinacastro]

take a look about dup content and backlink profiles as brinked told you

[Planet13]

I will say this again. Google has tweaked or made their over optimization filters more strict. This is not only onsite or offsite, they have a formula for how they decide you are too aggressive targeting a keyword or set of key-phrases and if you trip that filter your rankings will take a dive for those phrases depending how aggressive you have been...

I would like to know whether this would be defined as a devaluation of the link value, or a devaluation of ALL inbound links, or as a "penalty" of some sort applied to either the individual page or the site as a whole.

In essence, an A/B test where Site A did no link building, and Site B did over-aggressive link building. They both have the same number / quality of NATURAL inbound links.

After this over optimization filter is applied, would they both rank the same? (After all, they both have the same number / quality of naturally occurring inbound links.)

Or are you saying that Site B (which was overly aggressive) would rank lower than Site A (since google dismissed the value of ALL inbound links to site B - even including the same naturally occurring back links)?