Hello Just wondering what you guys think. Does a huge increase of backlinks in a short time actually have a negative effect? I have a story to tell. I manually built backlinks myself for around 4 - 5 months. I managed to build around 8,000 during that time. My rankings were gradually improving day by day. Then, I hired an SEO Freelancer who managed to build around 22,000 backlinks within 1 - 2 months. After about a week or two after the backlink update, my rankings have dropped massively. I've gone from Page 2 - 3 to Page 15+ within a week or so. I'm hoping this isn't permanent. So, what do you think?
It has happened to me too. Pagerank dropped from 4 to 0. SERP dropped from page1 to page6 just for builidng backlinks too fast. My site hasnt recovered for a month or so now, with Google I can only hope and not complaint.
Did that freelancer do anything else other than link building. Theoretically Google doesn't want it to be possible for one site to sabotage another. So I'm thinking the ranking drop was caused by something else. If anything Google just wouldn't count some or all of those bulk links.
Gaining too many links too quickly (although nobody knows the exact thresholds except Google) does have a negative effect, as Google view it as a unnatural way. But more importantly make sure the freelancer didn't do certain tricks that will call for immediate penalties from Google. Have him explain what exactly he did to gain THAT many links in 1-2 months.
Most of the time - google gives major negative ratings for sites that suddenly have a huge increase in backlinks. Google will forgive when you remove each and every backlink. L.O.L.
I agree that Google penalizes some links. I have a site that was growing and was in the top 10 for a lot of keywords. I kept building backlinks and then my site plummeted like a rock.
Focusing on backlinks and backlinks alone seems to be a sure way to end up getting burned in the long run. Coupled together with other techniques however and it does still form a goodly portion of SEO. Gradually building up 'real' backlinks seems to provide far better results than one time 'spam' of a large number of backlinks. -Vish (Zephyr Writing).
The question is "where do the freelancer link your site?" Quality is better than quantity. There is a possibility that the freelancer made some mistakes especially in linking your site to other sites.
That really huge number and I wonder how many (if any) was came from penalized site. As a simple rule, build links naturally, it is the quality that counts.
Google is pretty smart. If he built that many links in two month he may have used some paid links or an automated system for commenting on blogs for example. I bet Google is smart enough to pick up bogus blog comments. Lets say there is a banned site that has 5000 pages on their website. You buy a paid ink on each one. That's 5000 links but Google knows it's a paid link and penalizes you. If he is a black hat SEO guy he may have done something else to get you in trouble.
how can that be? if it is true, we should all be doing that to our competitors sites that might be ahead of us in the serps, it would be worth a try to find as many penalized sites out there and put links on them to competitors sites there could be a new market in "bad links" if that is the way google wanted to do it... I know many people would pay for bad neighborhoods to link to a competitor site if google was dumb enough to make off-site links able to do damage
Your drop may not be permanent, so keep your fingers crossed. But yes, getting too many links too quickly can hurt your ranks especially if the anchor text is similar. Google tried to minimize the Google Bomb effect, and getting too many links very quickly can cause a flag to go up. My question is where did these 22,000 backlinks come from? If they are spammy links, with the same anchor text, then you may want to remove them. Good luck
Thanks for your responses guys. I had thoughts that the penalty could have been because of the huge increase, but then I also thought that if it was, everyone would just do it to each other, so I'm not sure. I guess I'll have to ask him how he built the links. On another note, has anyone got a story with them recovering after a penalty like this?
you say that with such definity.... if you are so definite, please post some references or experiment results that you have done
Google seems to try and focus on natural links, so any kind of mass link building could cause a site to be penalized. Also some link building strategies could be considered as spam. Its best to focus your site on content and other SEO factors other then just links.
stop the madness here, people... you all keep posting on here like parrots, but no proof or references do you all work for google or something? how do you know what you are posting is true? if what you are saying is reality, then there is a huge blackhat opportunity to cause damage to competitors
where did these 22,000 backlinks come from? I want get to know the person. I have 20+ posts here everyday . And I have my links in my signatrue. Will my signature links be consider growing too fast ? Anyone can give me answers?