I fear that one of my site could have got a link bombing penalization (it shows about on the 21st page of Google for a quite popular 2 word keyword contained in the domain name). How do you know if your site has been penalized, and eventually is the link bombing penalization only temporary? Thanx.
If you built up too many backlinks with the exact same link anchor text, it could take quite a while to get rankings back. About all you could do is change the anchor text of some links and keep building more links with a variety of other anchor texts. Or do you mean someone tried to sabotage your rankings?
Seems to me like all penalties are temporary. But in most cases it takes 6-12-18-24 months for them to expire (after you fixed the problem). I really hate it when that happens to me sometimes. What's even more annoying you can't always find out the reason for being penalized.
No, no, surely no one is trying to sabotage my unknown new site, but I got the doubt of being penalized because I was stupid enough to build some hundreds backlinks with the same anchor text in a pair of weeks...
Yes many rookie seo's make this mistake. They get obsessed with getting rankings for one keyword phrase and they build links like crazy for that one phrase. Luckily such a penalty often only applies to that specific keyword. So if I were you I would keep building more backlinks, but avoid that original target phrase for now. Target 6 - 8 related phrases that ideally overlap your main target keyword phrase. To get rankings for that penalized phrase you may just have to be patient. If you can't edit the links you may be out of luck unless you can contact the website owner. Maybe just forget about such links and work at building more links to balance the anchor text distribution.
But do you think that just waiting and try to balance the anchor text distribution could solve the penalization for that specific keyword? As I was saying before, those two keywords are the exact name of the domain, so to me it's quite absurd that for the rest of the days my site won't show up for those keywords... On the other hand, I'm not also that sure that I've been penalized, I could as well being sandboxed...damn, I just hate that secret algorhitm of Google!
I don't know about link bombing but maybe you can tell me how you were able to find the Google page position for your website. I am just starting some SEO related to my niche website and wonder where it might be buried as a starting position.
If I'm not wrong, there are some Firefox AddOn to do this automatically, but I prefer do it manually in this way: go in preferences in google homepage and choose 100 results per page. Now, put the keywords you are targeting in google search box and hit enter. Use the 'Find' feature of your browser and look for your domain URL. Doing this way it's a matter of minutes to find your position. Hope this will help you out a little.
The drop in SERPs is temporary. Continue building links naturally. After some time you will get higher than you were before the drop. Google needs some time to calculate the worth of the links you have built.
The only way I know to counteract this is to build more links with a mixture of anchor text. Although I do not know the exact percentage, I read somewhere that the penalty applies if +60% of your links have the same anchor text. So let's say that you bombed 100 links with the same anchor text. If you put up another 100 links with different anchor texts, then you will have brought the percentage down to 50% of your links having the one anchor. If you add 200 more links, then the percentage on the first will have dropped to 33%. That might get you out of the muck. I know a lady who did this once and got herself out by contacting all the webmasters who gave her the link originally, and got rid of most of those links. But it took 8 weeks for the correction to be noted and the ranking restored.
Thank you for sharing this. ATM I'm just trying with different anchor text, since I'm not that sure of the penalization, and anyway would suck too much to delete all the links built previously...
yes, that would be the best course of action at this point. come up wiht couple of other related keywords for your site and build some backlinks for them. for example, if you were targeting "digital point" as a keyword, you also can build links for "digital point solution" and "digital point forum" which is all related but both the later KWs have the main keyword in them
This happened to me a couple of times. Lesson learned. Get more links and mix up the anchor text as much as you can. If you have too many "red widgets" and not "red widget" try...buy a red widget online, buy widgets - Blue, red and pink widget store, click here for our widget store, Great widgets, etc...When i get 2000 directory submissions done, I always target at 40 or more anchor text. Directories are great to vary the anchor text a ton!
it was a while back and I did not know how to address the issue, so i did nothing for 1 year. Then I got some more links and now I am number 2 on big G for theterm that was penalized. Variations of the offending term are also good to target. please see my above example, but lets say you got too many with "Dallas Real Estate" Then add some more with Realtors in Dallas, Texas Realty Company, Dallas realty and brokerage, Dalls realty brokers, etc...Directories are great for 5 or 6 word anchor text variations.