What is wrong with my site? I get quality links but rankings keep falling

Greetings,

I won't post my site but I will describe some behavior. Let me know what you think this behavior means.

For the past 1-2 months, my rankings for a few test keywords have been dropping about 2 positions every 2 days. Pages stared at position 12 and slowly fell to 60.

During the same time period, I've built very high quality deep-linking backlinks to various related categories in my site. These are not directory links nor paid links. I've manually contacted topic-related and established websites asking for 1-way links from their resources or links page which have between 10-20 total links inside them on average.

In 2 months, I received about 40 links in all, varying from PR2 to PR4, mostly all PR3 links though. About 4 links required a link exchange, the rest were rewarded as 1-way links based on merit because they were impressed with my site. Not a single link was purchased. It may not seem like many links, but I assure you they are high quality and took a lot of work and time to get. I did not receive all of these links in 1 day, they were spread out, maybe one link every few days.

This is about it, I've honestly done nothing shady or blackhat.

So has anyone experienced anything similar to this? Basically acquiring nice, quality whitehat links and yet the rankings start gradually falling?

Thanks
Kind regards

 

Keep understand latest google's panda and penguine updates

 

I had the same type of behavior with my sites and I have done (and I continue doing) manually link building. I think that the whole process is slow and we need to be patient to see a difference in the ranking. As long as our niche is very competitive we need to continue applying the methods. Have you measured the backlinks you build with a tool such as Open SIte Explorer?
It takes time to see all the links you build...

 

It is cause of latest Google updates .

 

Well, I measure my backlinks by recording them in Spreadsheet and highlight the ones that people link back to me with. Gradually, they show up in Google Webmaster Tools and Alexa, so I watch the count this way as well.

I don't think it's Panda or Penguin, those updates were great for a successful niche version of the site I did last year. This new site I have is a broad and general site with a number of niche categories within it (which I build deep-link niche backlinks to). I thought it might have been the sandbox since my site is about 7 months old. I had the "honeymoon" period for a short time and it suddenly dropped off to the sandbox as expected about 4 months ago. But I've never experienced a steady sandbox that changes and gradually kills the rankings so they get worse and worse over a 2 month period.

 

it cause of latest google update's

 

May be the amount of link you were building was too much to Google. I felt the same for one of my blogs and the blog is currently no where near the position it started. I got message in Webmasters that they have identified something suspicious. I was building some links by exchanging that is true. But not like in the pace you are talking about. Still..

 

I guess you should look into the quality of contents...

 

We have need to patient for this lots of websites is fall down in this update, which face same problem like you let see for next google update.....

 

there is no specific reason for this behavior but seem that your website has something black may be its quality of content or it may be some issue with links you are building for your website