Hi Guys, Sometime over the weekend we found our site had dropped what seems to be 25 places in google for a keyword. Its been slowly creaping upto the top of page two over the last couple of months, after the weekend is now 25 places down in the middle of page 4. We don't have any messages in the google webmaster tools page, just the drop in rank. Initially I thought it was the good ol, google dance but its been 4 + days now. I cant think of anything that would cause it. The only thing it could have been is we have been plugging away at this keyword and submitted about 200 links to freebie directories over the period of a couple of weeks. 75% of these links were related to the keyword in question however upto 50% of the submits may have had just that keyword as the anchor text. Am I being paranoid and google is dancing or have we been had? Thanks
Just give time to see if the google dance is affecting you, have you ever done any blackhat techniques or something against Se's guidelines?
I can almost guarantee that this is the Google dance taking place. It sucks, but you have to do your best not to worry about it for at least 2-3 weeks. Most of the time your site will bounce back to a higher position then it originally had before the dance began.
Not that I know of Im sure that's what happened with our primary keyword - top of page two - clears off - middle of page 1. If your saying it could be doing a 2 or 3 week dance then that puts my mind at peace, I have just never knew it could take that long. Thanks Guys
Hey Mark, I was ranking for #2 in Google for well over a year but since the 18th January I've dropped to the second and sometimes third page. I seem to make steady progress climbing towards the top of the second page before sliding down to the bottom again-it's almost as if there's an artifical ceiling that my site isn't allowed to reach. As per my recent posts on here I can't see Google penalising ANY site for backlinks or any other form of off site optimisation otherwise competitors would be building dubious backlinks for their competitors sites.
Another weekend and everything has taken a hit Main keyword from 2 > 3 and plural of the keyword OP has dropped a couple of pages and the OP keyword SERP has vanished :S
What is the time frame which you had taken to get those 200 links? Have you used only 01 anchor text? If you had used the same anchor text for all 200 links - I think, google had given penalty to your site. OR If you had got all these in short time frame (1-5 days) - Still you are under google's penalty because, you had got links within short time. My solution to overcome this issue is, Get 5-10 backlinks daily from decent sites , within a week or so, you will be back
2-3 weeks. 90% were directory submissions so I suspect most probably haven't even been added. 40% of the links were with 1 Anchor text, the others were variations of that anchor or something completely different....
I've recently come to the conclusion that Google can't penalise you for this form of OFF site optimisation. If they DID penalise your site for cranking out 100's of backlinks in only a few days and/or used the same anchor text then what's to stop you from launching a malicious backlink campaign against one of your competitors ? All you would have to do is submit THEIR site with THEIR anchor text to as many directories as you could find and Google will eventually penalise THEIR site for YOUR actions..........it just doesn't make any sense that Google would do that as it's a massive flaw in their system. My site is still suffering. There are websites above me that look like they could have be written by my grandmother and they're still ranking higher than me. Just in case I am wrong with my theory-is a google penalty permanent or will rankings recover after time ? UPDATE: As I write this I have discovered my ranking has dropped further........from #23 to #107 in only one day !
My 3 cents... Avoid submitting to a bunch of crap free directories jammed with spammy links and keep building links EVEN if your site is ranking well...
This is all frustrating to me. Between things like the Google dance and sandbox it seems like Google does not what websites to do well. If I thought they actually were working with us not putting any roadblocks up then I would be more likely do do Google adwords and be interested in other things they offer that cost money but as long as it appears like they are trying to find ways to hole us back then I will not spend money with them. Does Google really have the dance and sandbox because for some reason they want to make ranking hard for us?
Just had a quick look at some of our top keyword and ours have also dropped back a little i remeber the 1st time this happened i was gutted but after about a week it came back and even went higher,its not the 1st time and i doubt it will be the last time i just keep on building the backlinks and posting on the forums.Good luck with it
Google or other popular search engines are using real time search results. FOr you to rank higher you need to have higher tweets as it is now also the deciding factor in ranking. There are other more factors but this is the newest one.