I have a website that gets about 7,000 unique visits/day and it now has 300 unique visits/day. I know exactly what happened and why. I bought a service through a person on DP in the "services" section. They were selling packages fro 1 way links through forums. I started off with the lowest package 100 links, 3 links per site, so basically its 300 links. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=108966 They then spammed about 150 1 way signature links back to our site in less than a week, all unrelated sites. I had a travel site. So, of course, this is my fault and i take responsibility for that. I typed "site:www.xxxxxx.com" and all the pages are still indexed. But none of our keywords are ranked highly now. Anyone have similar experiences and know how to get back into Google SERP?
Just do some directory submission/social book marking/article submission or buy links from relevant sites !
your site is in sandbox. i had the same problem. took me about a year to get back to the first page just keep building quality content and attract relevant links.
I used a directory submission service that I found here on DP and now have the exact same problem. I was on page one for Google, Yahoo and MSN for very competitive keywords and now I am totally in the Supplemental index and not ranking for a single keyword in Google. I barely hanging by a thread in Yahoo for a few pages and MSN is OK but I did take a hit there as well.
Site maintenance is the key. Keep writing good articles and press releases for your site and submit them to popular submission sites such as goarticles and przoom.
try to balance the link equation and get some quality links since you have a large number of forum links, try getting other link types - especially the links from sites in your industry/niche
Most people have their links in their signature. The amount of times they have it depends on their post count. I don't think it would have been the major cause to your problem. If your site is rather new then it would happen anyway. Infact if it is rather new then the forums links may have actually helped it a little as you actually got some back links which you didn't have before, which may get it out of the stand box earlier than it would have. Best bet is to keep building quality one way links. Go for quality and not quantity, that may help.
never ever try for paid link, try to get links from quality and relevant sites through reciprocal link, bookmark site link etc
Well, there is no way this could ever cause the problem. Anything that your competitor could do to harm your site, in your case go to DP and submit your link to 100000 spam sites, can't triger google filters to throw you out!!! On the other hand if your site is new (less than 1 year old) This would be a normal inevitable effect of sandboxing. Read more about it from experts here http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=71522
Give it sometime , this is a temporary situation and build quality links plus content and prove that your site is worthy enough for ranking in google's eyes.
and most forums have nofollow too and google counts only one link grom the whole site for ranking purpose also anyone can have a sig link from forums so google doesn't value them much either
True.... Also all the spam sites and bad neibourhoods linking to your site would just be ignored by Google. But if you link to them.... hmmm, you are in a big trouble!!
Well, I was in similar situation when bought some back links, my site was out of serps, but fortunately came back within two weeks. Not sure what happened but I assume it was Google algo changes that put me temporary out of serp?
I used to think this as well, but I am starting to change my opinion on it, I think if your incoming links become very unnatural, unbalanced, etc., you will be penalized by Google for it, i.e. if you gain 200 links in one month from what Google sees as "spam sites" using the same anchor text, you might have a problem.
Even if you sit and just watch your new site, you may notice big serp ups and downs. If you do nothing but link building, you will think it causes your downs. If you work on your site and change something, you will think that change caused it. The only thing when you could get penalized for too many backlinks built in a short period of time is when google knows for sure you did it, the owner. And if google can spy on you so well, you get what you deserve