I registered a domain a little over 4 months ago. After one month of being registered, I created a home page for the site. Two weeks later, it was indexed for my main theme keyword. My first backlink was a PR 3 contextual link, highly relevant to my keyword. I then started doing forum profile links, blog commenting, and forum thread links, almost all relevant to my keyword. I was also working on category keywords as well, so as to look natural and not suffer the duplicate anchor text penalty (if there is one). Over the course of the next 3 months, I continued to create 100 PR 0 links and one high PR link once a month. Then, out of the blue, my site ranked number 11 for my main theme keyword. I jumped for joy as I thought I was near the end. Boy was I wrong... My main theme keyword gets 100 searches a day, and has over 5,000,000 competing pages. Despite this, all the top ranking sites are not well optimized for the keyword, and are all PR 2 and below. After two to three weeks at number 11, I went down to 45. I was sad that day. The real questions here are: Did I go too fast during my Google ranking strategy? Is the sandbox causing this and I should continue this strategy anyway? Should I have waited 3 months before starting SEO, or should I have just added, say, 10 links a month while leaving the high PR links for later? I have heard that leaving high PR links for after six months have past looks more natural in Google's eyes. Hopefully an experienced SEO can share their knowledge with me as I am still stuck at 45 after two weeks!
Wow great effort and interesting issues. Will follow the discussion for my own benefit. Hope expert seo will reply to your post.
Maybe your site competitor is also doing SEO and then after new Google update outrank you or Maybe the other website have acquire links that boost them to ranking.
My sites links are still more relevant and authoritative than my competitors. Not only that, but as stated before, my rank is 45. That is way too low to be possible. I am wondering if the Google Sandbox had anything to do with this, so I can just continue to build links until I reach an appropriate domain age.
Nope, nothing. There are no crawl errors or anything to report in my Google Webmaster Tools account. As for on page optimization, I am very targeted with my main theme keyword. My site speed is extremely fast as well.
When you look at your webmaster account, under links back to your site: are they top heavy from any one site? is there a fair amount of long tail backlinks? is there a diversity of keywords or is it predominantly just the one?
There are many reasons behind dropping your site position in Search Engine. 1) May be some sites had removed your site links or expired their domin, e.g suppose your are getting links from directory A and somehow that directory domin expired. and your link count deteriorated. 2)May be the reason is Penguin, Last but not the least, site structure, quality content, site speed, However, keep continuing building link, but don't only focus on same source, always try to get link from various source, like web directories, Press Release & Articles Directories, Blog, other Social Networking Sites.
Aside from my main theme keyword, I also have category keywords as well. I update my blog once a week with a new keyword. I have also done SEO on those pages as well, as to look natural. As for my webmaster account, I see no problems at all.
hi.., 1. Can we get your site to provide more insights 2. As you are saying that, 100 "0" PR Links and 1 High PR Link.., in those 100 Sites, there might be sites which are already blacklisted, expired domains which are all redirected.., 3. Within a span of 7 months your backlink profile is increased to 300-500 backlinks as you mentioned it (Over the course of the next 3 months, I continued to create 100 PR 0 links and one high PR link), but in the eye of google, it might think you used some sort of software, blackhat techniques to increase your backlinks with in a short time. 4. Did you rotated keywords frequently? Hope this info helps you out.., if had to see your site.., we can provide some more insights.. Thanks..