So I've spent a month doing some link building for a site. I've acquired about 14 links and 10 directory submissions the past month. The Yahoo and MSN rankings have increased a great deal actually, but the Google rankings are UNCHANGED. It's been a month since I've gotten links, which I think is enough time to expect SOME change in rankings (usually when I get a few links, for targeted, less competitive terms in the industry niche, I'll notice increase in rankings at least the 6th or 7th page). However, none of the rankings for Google have changed at all. Could it be that there's a penalty associated with the domain? Is there any way to check? Assuming that there is a penalty, could 301 redirecting the old domain to a new domain be a technique to get around it? Let's say the domain name is www.abc.com. If we were to redirect it to "www.theabc.com" or www.abc.net or www.abc.org, would that work? Or would Google still associate "abc" as a penalized domain? Would a entirely new domain (www.xyz.com) be required? I'm pretty much lost as you can tell, and I'm just looking for some answers! Any help would be greatly appreciated!
24 backlinks is really not very many at all. Have you checked how many backlinks - and where - your rivals for your keyword have? (Yahoo and msn use onpage factors more - which may be why you're doing better in them)
Yahoo & MSN care more about link quantity, while Google cares more about link quality. So perhaps your 24 links are just low quality links. Directory links are mostly low quality. 24 links usually isn't enough to get any good rankings. I don't think you can automatically assume you are penalized just because these 24 links did not help....yet. Those links might still age to count for more. Taking a break from link building for a whole month isn't really a good idea. By doing that you are basically telling Google that your website was relevant for a short time, but hasn't been relevant for a month. When your link building dies off like that, why would your Google rankings go up? Getting Google rankings does require you to gain Google's trust. So you shouldn't be doing anything spammy and you need links from other trusted websites.
hard to tell wothout the domain name. 1 month of link building and 24 links may not be enough to get ranked on google depending on how competitve your niche and search term is. if competitive, then you are looking at atleast 3 months of link building before you see any result. more competitive terms will take 6+ months of link building before you can get some result on google. also, link building is a constant process and you cannot just get few link in one month then stop. it is not natural this way so you have to keep building backlinks
I'm actually working for the guy that owns the site, so it has some good age (8 years) and the site actually had a little over 2000 backlinks to start with. The homepage is PR3. I acquired 14 quality links, from quality, relevant sites, contextual links using keywords as the anchor text, and about 10 directories. It's just that I'm accustomed to seeing some type of ranking change for at least some of the kw, and not to see any after 3, almost 4 weeks of acquiring the links is quite a surprise to me. I'd like to research and see if the domain has a penalty associated with it. Any additional thoughts?
Google is still dancing mate... serp position is unstable yet. Wait for few days till google feel tired and runs out of energy
quality backlinks are a must, with keyword anchor text and the last few days has been hit and miss on G throwing up some good/bad changes for me.
If your site shows in results, you are not penalized. The most probable scenario is that those 24 links dosent mean mucho to google.
24 backlinks cannot be considered enough unless they are from very good source. I have seen that atleast 30 links required to get better ranking for 1-10 Million competition.
There is nothing such like penality as you are talking about...if there is some penalty or if your website is in sandbox then you must not be in google search engine... Dont worry just work on quality links and not quantity of links...