I need your help figuring out why my website dropped in rankings. I was targeting a specific keyword for one of my websites by building backlinks through article marketing. This is for a 1,000,000 results keyword. I was really happy 3 weeks ago when I all of a sudden ranked 300 for that keyword. Then, 2 weeks ago, it ranked 200, 1 week ago it ranked 120, 3 days ago it ranked 280, now it completely disappeared from the top 1000. This ranking I'm 100% sure came from article marketing. I've written about 50 articles and mass distributed them. In just less than a month of doing this, my site came into the top 300, and in this time it disappeared as well. I wanted to get to the top 10, so I kept submitting more and more articles with that keyword. Is this bad? And if it is, what's the solution? O yeah, all my other keyword rankings have stayed the same, it's just for this one keyword. I don't think I've been penalized or anything.
If the site is rather new then you probably got sandboxed. Although from time to time google will do this. I will check and be no where to be found but check again the next day and my ranks are back to normal. I'm not sure why this is but it happens from time to time.
Did you build the links too fast? Google will drop your rankings if you build links too fast as they think you're spamming
This happens sometimes with some keywords, especially if they are mainly ranked for around article submissions. The problem is article submission links "suck", only easy way to say it. Yes, they have a short short term effect, but as they get burried in the mass database of other articles the links contain less value. Try building some quality relevant backlinks, you'll see much better improvements.
plus are you keeping track of the backlinks google is reporting? and a PR update can change your ranking.
The pr update wont change your ranking. Google keeps a live pr for every site. They only update it to the world every 3-4 months. So even if you're site shows a pr0 google may see your site as a pr3 already they just haven't updated it for the world to see.
I did a lot of unique submissions as well, because I was afraid of what you just described above. I've observed results from the isnare submissions and figured out that the backlinks come in the hundreds at first, but in the end (6 months later) only 1 or 2 backlinks show up. So, lets assume google penalized my site for too many backlinks too quickly. How would I go about fixing this?
Just give it time google will figure out you're not spamming and they will boost you back up. Some people say don't add more then 3 backlinks per day others say 100. All i know is that they do hurt you if you do too many too fast. Only a select few people actually knows how many is too many though.
It could be a duplicate content penalty, is your sites homepage unique? run a quick check on copyscape, maybe someone has copied your content and you were the one that ended up with the penalty, its happened to me before