Hi Guys, Something very strange happened with us. We had our site in the sandbox for 6 months, and then all the sudden we got out and shot up the ranks - this happened immediately after (36 hours) we added RSS syndication and soon after a blog. Anyway I think one of these - either the RSS or the blog (we set them up seperately) probably triggered our getting out, unless it was "coincidental". Anyway we started celebrating as we thought we got ourselves out (and from our own efforts) Then after a couple of weeks, the site is still climbing and then our webmaster exchanges links with 30 websites (we never did link exchanges before, just one way links) and he ads a page that just says resources with a list of links and descriptions below the title. I told him to add content on the page so it appeared more legit and he didn't get around to for several days. Then about 5 days later after the page was added we all of the sudden we start dropping what seemed to me to be about 5-7 pages a day in google, and now we are nowhere, but we show all the chracteristics of being in the sandbox again, as only our hompage is indexed. Any idea what happened? I am assuming it was that links page with 30 links and no other content (except main menu, footer, etc) but I'm not sure...
I don not think this is anything to do with the sandbox, although I think it has been heard of on a number of occassions. My understanding of this would be spamming if you links are all on one page with no content. I have always had a rule which has never let me down; never add more than 2 backlinks a day back to your website and always ensure that they are on different sites with different IP addresses. This way google and the likes of cannot consider you for spamming! Hope that helps
dpbuk, Thanks for the feedback, what do you think the recommended course of action would be - should we just add content to the links page or just take it down? I am assuming we are just being penalized but if the penalty can be lifted somehow sooner it would be a great help! Energizer
Netaddict, I have checked and they are not in a bad neighborhood from what I can tell, in fact they are all real estate related like our site, so similar theme too, good PRs and nothing shady. I am starting to realize that maybe this Jagger update going on is revaluating link age and link filters, as many of our links are pretty new, but just an idea...
>>>never add more than 2 backlinks a day back to your website<<< Where do you get this information from ? energizer, Im with ya bud. I have a property site that ive grafted my balls out on for 11 months, it popped out during Jagger and now gone back. It's so frustrating but I'm not going to give up even if takes another 6 months of graft I dont care, I won't be beaten ;-)
Hey Guys, What would happened if we just removed our reciprocal links page completely, just temporarily - would this be a good way to confirm if we have linked to bad neighborhood websites? Maybe if our rankings come back this is a good way to know, however maybe we would get penalized for doing this? Energizer
Guys, Ignore my message above, I am going to start a seperate thread as I think my last post is on a different enough topic... Energizer
Yeah this happened to many of my sites quite recently in fact. It is very frustrating, although after I seen it happen again and again. I know what to expect...lol Don't worry keep doing the motions and you may get an amazing position like many of my sites that weren't even in Google for the competitive term I was targeting!
Only do one major change or addition at a time...that way if something goes wrong you can easily trace it.