I hired an SEO company Saturday, keyword disappeared Monday.

Hi guys -

I hired an SEO company on DP Saturday... stupid me, I learned a lesson. they put about 10 links up toward my site and sent me the report... the links weren't very high quality. Again, my mistake, I should've been more clear.

Today, after being #2 in Google for about 5 months, my main keyword dropped about 6 pages. It's too much of a coincidence.

Can I just have the links removed? Will my rankings come back? HELP!

Thanks for the input guys!

 

A few questions for you...

Was the SEO company's only task to perform inbound link building? Did they perform any on-page SEO at all? Did you ask them to help you rank for any specific terms? Does the anchor text from your new links contain your main keyword, or something else?

 

You should remove all irrelevant links they have made to your website. A bad link can do much harm to your website. Never link from a link farm. Have you given out any links? Was it a link exchange ? You should also change all on-page stuff they have done on your website. Hope you will get your rankings back in some days time.

 

They haven't touched my actual site yet (it was planned), but now I won't let them.

The anchor text contains a different word, but my main keyword is the one that suffered.

They have 10 blog comment linked to me -- that's all. I stopped the damage at that and will have them do nothing further. I did want inbound links, but I stressed quality (several paragraphs, on-topic), relevant blog comments, not the garbage that they did. It was my fault, I guess, but now I want to correct it.

Okay, so I should contact these blogs and ask them to delete the links?

 

If your website got irrelevant backlinks then you should surely remove that. The links from blogs which are in the same niche as yours can help while blogs in other niche's can hurt you.

 

If I remove the links, will my rankings come back?

 

I personally cannot speak as to whether the links are hurting your or not, as we do not enlist much link-building for our sites. It would occur to me that your rankings may not fall so quickly even if the links are irrelevant. It seems to be a very short period of time for the links to have taken effect; whether good or bad.

It could be a Google anomaly. These happen all the time. Sometimes rankings fall off the map, and come back without warning or explanation. I can tell you that our Google rankings had some pretty big changes over the weekend, but most of them were positive changes. Of fourteen of our most popular keywords, we moved up on ten of them. Four of these words had HUGE jumps to page one. There appears to be some kind of major change taking place at Google currently, but who knows if it is permanent?

Best of luck to you!

 

Thanks Tara. By the way, I'm about 60 miles south on I77 -- Columbia

 

2 days lol. Google wouldn't have even found the links yet.

Back to SEO school for you.

 

lol, indeed, and even if they had found them you do not get dropped 6 pages for ten irrelevant links, i guarantee you.

i would bet really good money this is entirely unconnected to the SEO companies' work, its just Google's usual randomness looking like cause and effect when its almost certainly not.

 

I absolutely agree.

there is zero chance that 10 inbound links caused this change, UNLESS they were all unrelated PR6 to PR8 pages, which I doubt.

Ive been doing this full time for years, and I would advise you to give it a few days and you will 99% see the site popping back up again. Its most likely to just be an indexing issue.

 

Agreed. There seems to be an urban myth that a few unrelated links can completely trash a sites rankings, you really think google would make it so simply to sabotage others sites?

If all this SEO company have done is give you 10 links from blog posts then i am 99.9% sure, they have nothing at all to do with the drop in rankings.

 

Yes I would have to agree as well. In addition, Google wouldn't necessarily spider each of the blogs with said links in a timely fashion either. I highly doubt your keywords were "hit" but with that said you should definitely becareful who is linking to you.

 

Absolutely. If it were that easy, we'd all be concentrating on demoting our competitors instead of promoting our own sites!

 

I agree that 10 poor quality blog comments (or even 10 links from spammy link farms) is not going to have an effect on your Google rating.

However, it may be a blessing in disguise that your site fell from the first page just as the SEO company started. If their idea of SEO is to post low quality comments on blogs, then this wake up call may have saved you a lot of wasted money in payments to them.

 

If that is so then why can't we all damage our competitors by linking to them from bad blogs? The SEO books I've read say that inbound links CANNOT hurt you whereas outbound links (if to link farms, bad neighbourhoods etc) can.

 

Seems like the typical sandbox to me, dont worry.

 

If inbound links nuked the competition I would be selling just this.
A COMPLETE coincidence

 

Ah, my number #2 ranking is back just like before

Pure coincidence.

 

Hey was it the Abracabdabra SEO firm? .....our results are magic......