I've been trying to target a specific keyword phrase and in the past week I've gotten 1 PR6 link and 2 PR4 links. One of the PR4's was crawled by Google on the Dec. 2nd and the PR6 was crawled on the 3rd. The other PR4 has not been crawled yet. Here's the strange thing (Please remember that I recently updated my site for on page optimization, and Google hasn't recrawled it yet so in their index, they still have my old site where my keywords aren't in the title, image tags, etc.). I checked my ranking in the SERPs yesterday and was at 349. I wake up this morning and now I'm down to 381. I check again this afternoon, and now I'm in spot 404. I'm not sure where I ranked before I got these backlinks, but it seems strange to me that even though I have 2 new backlinks, I'm dropping in the rankings. Shouldn't I be rising because of the backlinks (where each anchor text is my keyword phrase)? I'm pretty sure Google doesn't see these backlinks as spam since there's only 3 links, one hasn't even been crawled by them yet, and I hear about people dropping 1000's of backlinks in one day and being OK. I'm hoping that once Google recrawls my site (I have absolutely no idea how long that's gonna take) they'll see the on page SEO and give me a higher position in the SERPs, but why in the hell am I dropping in the rankings even though I got 2 new, quality backlinks to my site? Thanks
Remember, other sites are attempting to do the same thing as you, many more sites ahead of you could of gotten more backlinks than you. Never thing your the only one in your niche doing SEO work on their site! You need many backlinks, not just 3 to be successful in SERPs.
Your page and the other link have probably been crawled just not cached. Because Google have found changes in your page your rank needs to be adjusted to reflect them so its not uncommon to head south. Chances are you will come back higher then before.
Ok, thank you guys for the info. I just checked my rank again and am now at 382, so I guess it was just fluctuating. I use this tool, http://www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/, to check on the number of backlinks a site may have (have any of you used this before, if so, do you think it's relatively accurate?). The phrase I'm tragetting has around 2,550,000 results and the site in 3rd position on the SERPs has between 35-50 backlinks targetting this phrase. I'm assuming all I will have to do is gain the same quality backlinks (possibly from the same sites, if not then from other related sites that are at least close to the same PR) with the anchor text being my phrase, but acquire them slowly over time and get links with different anchors so it doesn't look unnatural. Is this correct? ssandecki: I noticed you rank in the #2 spot for your phrase, which is AMAZING considering the amount of competition there must be. If you don't mind could you explain how you went about acheiving this? Do you just e-mail webmasters of other sites and request link exchanges, or is it from other sites linking to your pictures? Thanks again!
Backlinks isn't all that matter, they have to be very relative to give you a better position, plus it's very important to have a sitemap, good titles etc.
It takes consistent effort to keep the SERP up all the time. Keep those articles going at least every two weeks
Does anyone know of a similar tool to webuildpages, because now it cost $300 per month to use. The closest one I can find is backlinkwatch.com, but it is weak in that it does not group the unique domains instead of parsing through the sitewide links wasting valuable time and resources.