Right well i've seen a couple of threads with people worried about their SERPs dropping. I THINK that I have an idea of why so thought I would just explain what I think A while back I was reading on the google webmasters blog and saw that there were posts about how google did not value blog comments. They were recommending that no webmasters go make blog comments with the intent on trying to increase their SERPs. I didn't really believe this and hadn't seen any effect from my link building. But just recently google seems to have changed slightly. I believe that this is due to google reducing the weight given by blog comments. So this means that if you heavily relied on blog comments as your link development and only did a small amount of the others then you would have seen a large drop in SERPs. I also saw that some people hadn't seen any drops and in some cases an increase. Well I think that this must be because EITHER they had been doing a large amount of blog comments for link building recently so even though the weight was reduced, the sheer volume meant that it moved them up in SERPs. More convincingly though I think that it is probably due to them doing large amounts of link building in other places such as articles or directories. Now of course all of this is just speculation and I would also like to hear your comments/interpretations of it all.
Its easy to get to the first page...but to stay there is another thing. Probably just newbs tripping.
I am not quite sure if google changed anything yet, but if they didn't, they sure will later on. Many blogs are getting spammed by webmasters trying to hide keywords in their posts. Google first tried to use the "nofollow" tag, but that doesn't seem to have helped, as most comment spammers kept posting. Blog post link weight will go down for sure. Google wants links that comes from the blog webmasters themselves, inside the page content, because they will only link to websites they think are worth it. On the other hand, self promotion doesn't tell google anything about a website value.
Your post makes a lot of sense. There're plenty of people here who heavily rely on blog comments and change in algo will really affect them. At the same time I have been saying all along that blog comments should be good as it's just pure spamming and it seems google now thinks the same way. I'm not saying that I've never used comments but my blog comment links represent less than 5% of all links thus any development in blog commenting will barely affect me. Thus no wonder I struggle to understand why people complain about their SERP as my ranking is the same and slowly going up. Great analysis... can't say for sure if you're right but you make a good point.
Thank you. Wow less than 5% that's impressive. I have yet to explore all areas of link building but now I think I will. I tend to look for non spammed blogs but soon enough the pages I find get spammed anyway so its seeming rather pointless. It has made it very interesting for me now on all my SEO projects, keeps me on my toes!
You don't need to find lots of links to get good results in the SERPS but only quality links. I saw a lot of time site having 1000 more links and im only having around 35 good links and beat them totally in the SERPs...So in my opinion you have to stop thinking massively but more efficiently while doing link building...
Dang this.. Same thing here.. Use to come on First - Second Page max. and now i barely find my self on 5th page!!
The ups and downs of your SERP rankings is just normal. If you want to stay on top position, you have to continue what you are doing. As much as possible the more quality of inbound links the better. You have to update your content of course.
I have a question. Someone will spam my website links to thousand other irrelevant website. Google will drop my rank ?
Google usually does what makes most sense. What makes most sense to me is that comments on topical blogs will be worth something, but all others will be pretty much useless. My 2 cents ;-)
I just don't get how they can know which websites are blogs, forums, "home-made", etc.. Even if they were looking for some pattern in the code, it would be too much work to make it comply with all scripts out there.
Google have a large amount of employees working on this so this is simply how they do it. Very advanced coding and algorithms that very clever people have worked on! There is so many things that give away what type of site it is. Blogs you can just look for "powered by wordpress"! (thats what many SEO people do to try and find blogs to comment on). I know that sounds basic and not all blogs are wordpress but that's just one example. They can look at the format of outputs of that site and look at any code present and they can relate it to what type of site it is. If I knew more about coding I could probably explain this a lot better!! Thank you. Yes, I be amazed at how clever google is!! You may think they won't be able to track your SEO techniques as there are so many people out there and so much content on the web that you would think they can't track it all, but they manage to do a hefty majority. Well it is commonly thought no as this could be an easy way to just get rid of your competitors! Google can see lots of things, will see trends in the spam, look at other websites that have spammed those websites etc etc. I'm not saying your safe as google may be able to work out its not you, almost the opposite! I would try and stop this going on as much as you can but just carry on/start to just doing powerful and consistent SEO that isn't spammy.
You could be on to something there, I think alot of us, me included, have relied on blog comments and like anything that is done to much perhaps Google has decided to reduce the weight given to them when looking for at incoming links. I think having a well rounded link building strategy is what will help you in the long-run
Google always adjust their rankings to reflect trends in backlinking practice. I think that they have gotten wise to do follow blogs. However this is only one factor or hundreds of others that google includes in it's formula, good site content, daily updating, quality of backlinks as well as on page optimising of a site are also critical
NO, blog comment links are not dead... as the quality answers with good links will surely work, but mass commenting on auto approve blogs will never work (it used to work). How often you wake up in the morning and go to your blog just to realise that you have 100's of comments to moderate and your blog visitors are the only people who come there just to leave a link in a comment? But at the same time you have no problem going to somebody else's blogs spam them... why? Poosc, this is the reason I have never really used comments as I don't think it's ethical to spam irrelevant blogs. I don't even have a signature here on DP as my websites are irrelevant to DP users.
Serp, can drop if your anchor texts that you are using are not quality built, and your competitors are building more. Also in a period you didn't do link building and google droped the SERP, also beacause of your competitors activiti!!!