What is that single most important factor contributing to a massive drop in rankings?

What do you think is the single most important factor which will cause a massive drop in search engine rankings and Page Rank on Google ?

 

i will go for same content at number of places.

 

"Inbound links from bad neighbourhoods" shouldn't even be on the list.

 

It depends what do you mean by 'bad' - may this be a links from low quality sites like clouds or bad directories which loosing it's PR... then it affects your site certainly.

 

I think all of the choices can be the cause of massive drop in SERP. All of the choices is not a good technique in SEO Optimization.

 

I think all of the above mentioned choices are major causes of massive drop in SERP. I can't choose which one....

 

Agreed.

Excessive linking to bad neighbourhoods, i.e blackhat sites, will get your site kicked out of googles index, which = loss of pagerank too.

 

There is a reason why I listed the ' Inbound links from bad neighborhoods' as a poll option folks.

Here is a quote from a popular website. Take a look ..

"Large number of links from unrelated sites suggest a link manipulation scheme since the website may lack unique content to attract links naturally. This type of scenario can often be observed in new websites involved in indiscriminate link exchanges using link exchange networks whether it’s automated or manual. It’s inevitable you will have some low quality unrelated links pointing to your website, but if the majority of inbound links are unrelated, you can quickly find yourself in a lot of trouble. (Danger Score:7)"

Where the a danger score of 10 will most likely get you banned from the Google index.

Now you would obviously like to know which has a danger score of 10. Here is the one..

Quote
"Link farms and web rings are setup with the sole purpose to manipulate link popularity by using a central database, automated scripting and a network of websites. This method is usually beyond the reach of the average webmasters as it takes technological savvy and a large number of servers and other resources to execute. (Danger Score:10)"

 

I picked other since the blackhat tecniques will actually get you banned,

 

I think the main reason is: Losing quality backlinks

 

i will go for other blackhat methods

 

Other blackhat, duplicate contents and mirror URLs are the cause of rank drop.

 

Dupe content & lack of new content on a regular basis...

 

Among other reasons ...
ignoring building quality backlinks on regular basis can also cause penalty.

 

Are you referring to this article?: http://www.selfseo.com/story-18928.php

 

Outbound links to bad neighbourhoods got my vote.

 

Right there forcefield.

 

I think massive amount of links in bad neighbourhood can drop ranking.

 

I think the hidden Keyword Text will be found fairly quickly. Maybe your competitor will browse your site, see it and report it. Game over.

 

Same content at a number of places and outbound link from bad neighbourhood