Hi SEO gurus, This time i need your expertise. At October 28th some of my sites (authority sites for over a year, year and a half) got a huge slap and now rank 5th page for 90% of queries. Sites are 2-3 years old and respected, not a single url on them pointing to outside sites, no affiliates, nothing. Just unique content and Adsense. I don't buy/sell links. Nada, Zip, Nientes. As you may expect, i want to get my results back. This is what i am doing right now (and always do for the matter): > Unique relevant content added every week > Check the new links (added naturally by web users since sites are popular) > Check Webmasters tool (everything 100% as usual) (all the yadda yadda of SEO i do as usual: unique titles/etc etc) Now what? Should i continue to work as usual? Or is anything i can do right now to improve their rankings? Better wait or get aggressive? Thanks in advance guys.
Check you WMT links to see if they dropped. Have any of the pages lost PR or are GrayBarred? Check your old SEPR positions and compair them to the new ones. Does the value get close to 30? If it does, you most likely got busted for obtaining links to quickly. Or, you got ratted out by someone for selling links How to Lose Stomach Fat | Sig for sale - $35 per month | Full year $300
I said before that i don't buy/sell links. And even if i had lost some links in WMT (witch i didn't) my competitors have 20% of the links i have. Checked on G and Yahoo. Thanks for your comments Any other ideas?
Well Google doesn't act for no reason, either these sites were all connected to something fishy or one of your competitors could've possibly filed a spam report, copyright claim, etc. all oh which cause Google to throw you under the bus. I would also check their .htaccess files to make sure everything is legit, my .htaccess got hacked a couple days back and now I need to claw back up in the rankings.
Have you considered maybe you aren't being penalized but that your competitors are just getting better in rankings?
i'm with kappaknight... very likely the typical dancing hurt you. Have you gained in ANY keyphrases, or is it 100% down across the board? This is a nightmare scenario and I feel for you, as it's an incredibly helpless feeling until (or if ever) you get a sense of what and why.
did you ever response in lots of forums just said: support, thanks, goods, etc? If you do that the google will reduce your ranking
I had 2 in-content links crossing the sites. 2 from site A to site B, 2 from site B to site C... you know. As i freaked out, i removed them. Spam report? Copyright? No way, unique content for 3 years. WP/Blogger blogs? 5 Lines of text? Yellow pages? No way.
I heard that lots of authority sites have been losing rankings in the last few weeks. Google trying out a new alogorythm. Just be patient and things will get back to normal soon.
i got pretty much screwed last week for about a week or two with one of my sites . now its back to normal thank god!
Great news buddy! I just saw a lot of top rankings getting back up, but my sites still didn't make it.