I have a PR 4 site and on first page for some keywords. Recently, I ordered a 1000 directory submission. The submission was made on Nov 30. Starting Dec 4, my website ranking drops to nowhere. Some keywords are no longer on the first page. Has anyone experienced this problem before? What can I do now?
My site is a 1.5 yrs old site. It should be out of G sandbox already. I'm just wondering if there is a so called "filter" at G which triggered this. What is the criteria for triggering this?
i think you should give it a couple more days. sometimes when a large number of links apear google will play a bit with your rankings.
If you did some sort of bulk submission with the same anchor text then it can often hurt your rankings. To many links to fast can raise a red flag at Google which causes your site and link profile to be manually reviewed. Look to see if you have a -30 (usually a manual penalty) or a -950 penalty (appears to be automatic). When submitting to web directories you should always vary the anchor text and also do them slowly over time. 1000 all at one time could raise a red flag at Google if your site didn't have too many links to start with.
Agree, that is why i always ask and advice my clients to use many various titles and descriptions. Regarding your SERPs, its not 100% sure that dir. submissions had hurted your rankings, G contineusly updates its index and do changes from time to time, one of my sites got listed in dmoz and google dir. which are god or dirs. but still it is penalized by google, it ranks nowhere. So moral of the story is do smart link building with whatever strategy you implement, just use various titles everytime .
Sorry about your problem, but i have some explaination. As you say your site was submitted on Nov 30, and you see rankings dropped from Dec 4th. So in 4 days i dont think too many directories adding your site and also directories pages dont get indexed fastly. The main problem would be that you would have used same anchor text for too many dirs, or the directory submitter would have submitted your site to all spam link sites, ffa's, etc... these sites can be very dangerous. Manual submissions take lot of time, 1000 submissions would take atleast 3-4- days. So i fear that your site is submitted to spam sites, ffa' links rather than just directories, plz confirm this with the person who has done submissions..
I agree with powerboss, When you submit your site to a mass of webdirectory , you have to change the "description" and "Title" or google don't rank by these submission. In my experience You , or the webdirectory submitter, have to change the fields patern at each 50 webdirectory to have good backlink / ranking. And effectively contact the guy who have done the submission.
It's always better to go slow with the directory submissions. Regarding the person that you used for submission service, did he have a good reputation, did he have referrals of past clients that were happy with his service?
Pboss hit the nail right on the head. it's best to do your own manual subs. forget about the quantity, especially if G has seen your site gradually grow over 1.5 years.
1000 directors, may some of its are spam site, and may google thinking that for this much of dir sub mission by this short period may be by some tools. There is only like that chance and otherwise there is no problem on it. And also for the new site will be like that only, minimum will take 6 months to get a stabled position on SERP. Until that time according to my experience will be dancing
as a member wrote above, in that period of time, I dont think even 30% of the directories had approved your link. So if the guy wich you had paid for the submissions didnt post your link on spammy sites, etc, then its not because of the submissions. Many get the sandbox, allow several days and see what happens
I had this problem with one site, and it hurt the site quite badly - it's kinda permanent from what I've found of the problem. It fluctuates sometimes Google will bring you back in though. But yea don't do too many too fast, varied titles and descriptions don't really change anything - as I"ve seen sites submitting the same title description across tons of sites and being fine, so it's a matter of how profile a directory is, which raises Google's alarms. I have a suspicion (and that's all it is at this point) that Google has a way of detecting when someone is using a popular link directory script.
Some pretty terrible replys on here, with one with some common sense, somtimes mass submissions can cause ur rankings to fluctuate, due to your links changing, dont panic it will settle down, its not unusual for your site to go backwards for a little while. Woc
Give it a few days to settle down... Although I would never blindly submit a site to a 1,000 directories - there's all sorts of crap out there masquerading as a directory, sites you wouldn't want to be associated with
I would not do directory submissions to a new site, wait until is at least six months old. If you do dir submissions it takes a long time for the search engines to find the links most of the time, and it take times for the directory admins to approve so you will not get 1k links all at once any how. Since your site is 1.5 yrs old I don't think it was the dir submissions that caused this, more than likely it will come back to your original serp position after some time. My best site just took a dive but it seems to be coming back, yours will probably as well.
I bet you have too few links, not too many. 5 days is not enough time for Google to even pick up most of the links from directories. A mere co-incidence, I'm sure.
stay away from automated or directories submission services many direcories are considered as link farms in googles eyes, only a few are worthy submitting to, and if you pay someone to lets say submit your site to 1000 directories then most of the time they woudn't what happens to your site so its better to be cautious yourself
It's a good lesson to me . Because I usually submit my link to many directories with the same title, description .