Site is gone from Page 1 after Off Page SEO

Hi all,

I have a site which is over 1 yr old. Last week, I noticed it on Page 1 #6 for a certain long tail keyword. I started some backlinking since then and it moved to #4 on Page 1. I continued to perform off page seo and now it's gone completely for the keyword..it's no where to be found in Google. If I do a site:domain search in google it comes up.

Question is...will it return to it's old ranking? will it return with a better ranking? As of right now, should I stop the off page seo and link building completely?

Thanks

 

Hi
by what you are saying I can only presume that you are experiencing what we call the google dance/ google shuffle- your website should come back and hopefully come back with better rankings.

It can take about 2 weeks so be a little patient.

regarding backlinking then i would suggest you do it moderately so that you dont look as if you have been spamming

 

It can be the result of Google Caffeine. Right now Google is rolling out google Caffeine, and upsets the whole SERP

 

Maybe, maybe not. perhaps the page 1 results wasn't where your site was supposed to be in the first place.

Or, perhaps Google decided it didn't like your backlinking techniques, and discounted your backlinks.

Or, perhaps you've been sandboxed.

It's hard to know exactly what might have happened. Give it sometime, and continue to build qualtiy, relevant backlinks, and you should be fine.

 

Yes I agree with what you say however i can not see the site being sandboxed after 1 year.

If google didnt like the backlink techniques then yes maybe they would devalue them however what about the backlinks which initially kept the website on page 1 - I can not see them getting devalued due to new backlinks. If that is the case then i would love to know what these backlinks are so that I can use them on my competitors sites and drop their rankings.

 

If the site isn't in Google at all, then you've been penalized.

Also, you said that last week, you noticed it was on the first page. Where was it before that?

 

Thanks for the replies,

It was always mid page 1 to the top of page 2.

The site is in google still..just not ranking. abs brings a good point about relevant backlinking. If that was the case then im just going to do negative backlinking to my competitors and bring them all down while my site climbs to #1. Kind of doesn't make sense in a way....also, Angela from warrior doesn't believe in the whole relevant backlinking theory and she's ranked #1 for highly competitive keywords.

 

Sometimes, you may have read it wrongly.

Google is in the progress applying caffeine to their search engine.
You can't monitor your ranking in Google sandbox search engine now as it is disabled.

There are other reason for this too.

Google uses Customization in showing results.

I suggest you to
- log out from google account
- disable customization in web history (top right of google search page)
Now, try to check for your site again.

 

Maybe you link to link farms or get low quality backlinks, so your site is untrusted by Google.

 

Its hard to guess. May be the google dance or you are envolved in link building with link farm. Be carefull in link building.

 

Google dance might be a reason which makes your site gone off from SERP.

 

If your using angelas links then they are powerful and im sure it is the google dance - it happened to many sites on many occasions.

 

Any work done on site or a link building campaign affect site rankings usualy they get down wait and keap working they will get back or even better

Regards

 

Previous backlinks being devalued wouldn't have anything to do with new backlinks.


For example, what if this guy has a strong pr3 backlink for a year, getting him to the mid 1st page. Then he starts a link building campaign, and then the pr3 page that had his link previously removes his link.

Starting a link building campaign and the removal of the backlink on the pr3 page have nothing in common. It's purely coincidence.

However, the net result is stll the same.

You don't *have* to have relavent backlinks. Non-relevant backlinks will help also.

But *her* pages that rank #1 on a highly compeditive keyphrase come of backlinks from PAGES WITH HIGH PR and NO OTHER OUTBOUND LINKS. That's *not* what she sells you in her package. She sells you mostly sites that have strong HOMEPAGE PR, and tell you to create profiles on them. What she doesn't tell you is that those profile pages are PR0, and provide almost NO SEO benefit whatsoever.

If you want to rank well on search engines for competitive terms, then you need one way backlinks from quality sties with strong PR and low outbound links.

 

It's the Google Dance. Nothing to worry about and I can almost guarantee it comes back stronger after some time that runs between 2 and 6 weeks.

It sucks to wait, but if you keep building quality links you'll be happy with the long term results.

A 1 year old site should come back quicker, but a lot depends on the % of new links added. For example if you had 30 links and then added 100, it would take longer to come back then if you added 100 links to a page that had 3,000 to start....at least that has been my experience.

 

Thanks for all the responses!

Heres another one I would like to throw at you guys. I wanted to view the stats of my site in Google Webmaster Tools. I logged in and I noticed my site is unverified. Very weird, because I verified it with the html file in my root directory over a year ago. I noticed that file was 0KB in size. How did that happen? Anyway, I downloaded another file and verified it successfully.

So in the main dashboard, I see this:

Googlebot has successfully accessed your home page.
Pages from your site are included in Google's index.

Top search queries

# Query Position
1 my longtail keyword 5

Updated Jan 14, 2010

This is the longtail keyword i've been discussing since my original post. I clicked my link and it's definitely not #5, it's no where to be found like I mentioned. Actually like I mentioned, none of the search queries are ranked in google, even though google webmaster tools states that they're ranked in google from #1-10 positions. Maybe i'm looking at the numbers wrong...I assumed positions mean where google thinks I rank in the engines? I may be totally off though b/c I just checked another site of mine showing #2 for some keywords where i'm not even close to.

What do you all think about this data? Is there anything else I can view and investigate in the Webmaster tools?

Thanks!

 

Google has a ton of data centers spread all over. It's possible the one you're accessing is not in synch with the one that is generating the Google Webmaster results. That being said, they should ultimately converge to the same value, although it can take some time to do so.

 

You need to wait for google to crawl again your site. Maybe 3 to 6 days

 

Thanks...site is definitely gone still!! The site is crawlable already by Google.

 

Hi everyone,

I thought it would be nice to update everyone here on my status.

My site came back to Google last week. I've been checking several times a day from the morning to the night.

Before it was removed, it was #4 in US...it's back to #4 position. In Canada .ca, it was #2 , it's now #1. I'm wondering how/why only .ca moved it up a spot? The backlinking wasn't performed solely on canadian sites...anyone know how google differentiates rankings in ca and us? How can I rank higher in US?

Anyway, here is one I would like to throw at you guys. I was attempting to get links in the past 2 weeks or so. I was checking my backlink profile for the site every day and it wasn't showing anything accumulating. This morning, once the site returned to it's original rankings, I checked the backlink profile and it was showing double than what it was originally showing. It was showing all the links I got before the site was taken down and a couple from this week.

It can also be the software i'm using for analysis (traffictravis).

I still don't have a clue why it was removed completely from Google for this duration...