I have a 4 month old forum (indianjobtalks dot com - the one in my signature). It has a PR2 for home page and PR1 forum page. We have around 4000 threads out of which around 2700 are indexed. I have some backlinks obtained mainly through forum posting and directory submission. Two weeks back, I bought a sitewide link (for 6 months) from a PR5 forum of typically very similar niche. This is a big forum with around 168,000 pages indexed and has good traffic. My forum gets around 100 unique visitors from google and was improveing. Suddenly google has stopped sending me traffic in the past 48 hours. Traffic has been abysmally low to 5 percent of what i was getting before. My indexed pages are intact. My SERPs have fallen drastically. For the search terms that I used to be in first page, my site is nowhere in the first 10 pages now. The only reason I can attribute is the sudden spurt in number of back links within a short period (17,200 when I checked last, and counting). I have asked to remove my sitewide link and put it only on the forum page (That site has forum page as home page.) Is there a better way to handle this? Or is this a temporary phenomenon and things will be back to normal soon? Share your previous experience if you have any. Regards, munna
I reckon its probably because you've built 17,200 links in 4 months, I read somewhere not long ago that having over 15,000 Links could seriously hurt your ranking
Check your site with the google webmaster tools. Also if your site is only 4 months old it could've gotten sandboxed still.
Google webmaster tool does not give any indication of whats wrong. It says business as usual. Sandboxed? possible. What I wanted to know is - whether the reason for sandboxing is the sudden spurt of back links in the past 2 weeks.
Its not in 4 months. All these time my link building was natural. Its only in the past 2 weeks, the back links increased tremendously after buying link. Will I ever get my traffic back from google? Yahoo is hopeless as it sends me only 2 percent of what google sends.