Hey guys. So, i have noticed some weird stuff on my last two "major" link building sessions. The first one was last month, I hired a guy on DP to do some link building for me. As it turns out, the links were crap. Most of them were no-follow, and eventually got removed because they were not relevant (blog commenting) The thing is, immediately after this, my site dropped in several of the SERPs which were bringing me traffic, after some time, it settled back though (position 1-9 for different keywords). I continued doing my normal link building methods (5-10 posts in various forms per day, 20 or so social bookmarks per week). Doing this eventually evened out the links to my site (compaired to the links that were dropping off because of the previously mentioned shitty link building service). Then, two days ago, i decided to kick it up a notch. I submitted my site to another 100 pr1+ social bookmarking sites. note: all of these had the same keyphrase (article title) and body text (excerpt from article text). I estimate about 10 of these were removed because they did not fit the specific niche of the site. So, that was two days ago, I check my analytics this morning, and see a whopping 1 hit into my site (normally 20 or so by the time i wake up). I search for my keyphrases, and I have dropped from position 1 to position 20. These keyphrases were related to the article that i distributed two days ago. I ran some of the competitors through siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com and did not see any real link building growth, nor page modifications since my last check (the 15th). So, did i fuck up, and get a little too spammy? Or is it just the google "end of the month dance"? ps: yes i checked my webmaster tools, and did not any warnings/errors (still says i rank for the keywords actually) pss: I was just getting ready to do an article distribution run, around 600 (slow submission) or so directories for a single article. this would be targeting a different keyphrase than that of my article...should I hold off on this untill the dance is done, or am i just being paranoid? EDIT: I guess that this might have been better suited for the SEO section, If an admin sees this, could you please move the thread?
The problem may very well be that you used the exact same text for all of those links. That is a huge red flag for Google's spam filter algorithms. Natural links would have much more variation. I don't think you need to hold off on the article submission. Just keep going with your regular seo strategies. If possible, vary the link anchor text for the page that dropped. Be patient and those rankings will likely come back.
Someone correct me if i get this wrong. "SERP dance" it's a term for rapid changes to your pages within the search engine results. Normally this happens when google makes some changes, and points their to a different database. This often is more prominent in "new" domains.
no change in pagerank. But one of my major keywords just returned. But many keywords for that site and others are still way way down in rankings.
Small dips often happen when you build new links, but they usually adjust you to rank better soon enough. As vansterdam mentioned, you also have to keep changing the link text "or else".
I think when the link building is against Google tos or suspected doing some Google TOS breaking I think this will happen,
Another one of my pages came back in the serps. It probably will all return to normal soon. I think right now its due to a massive pagerank update.
I'm pretty sure that is what's up. The page that isn't showing in serps now has a PR of 2 (from 0). and my front page (pr 3 from 0) is now showing in the first page of results for keyphrase+longtail, and second page for the keyphrase. If everything comes back correctly (fingers crossed) i should have a double listing for longtails, and first listing for the keyphrase.