Hello People, I seem to have a problem with fluctuating SERPs over the last few weeks. We were ranking 110+ for a couple of strong keywords for the last six months. However, couple of weeks back, there was huge jump in SERPs and we appeared to be ranking 12th and 13th respectively. This increased our traffic significantly. But to my horror, today I discovered that we are out of the SERPs for one of the keyword and we are ranking 30+ for the other. This is really annoying as we have put in a lot of effort over the last few months to run in quality in bound links and we have also worked a great deal in optimising other aspects of the site. We haven't bought any paid links and most of the links that run into the site are mostly content related and high quality. We have gradually increased our inbound links and it hasn't happened overnight. Do you think we have been penalised? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Well, if you dropped from a PR6 to a PR4... you have lost a substantial number of IBLs. I would guess that is why your rankings are dropping.
Sorry correction, we dropped from PR6 to PR4 during the last update, which as you suggest could be because of loosing some of the backlinks. But the SERP changes occurred early September 2007.
When did Google write you and inform you that your artificial links were quality? There is often a good deal of speculation here, and being a 3rd party it is hard to qualify your links as of any value, when the score of such is determined by a company which has not revealed any valuation charts, or baselines with which to compare and analyze. Another issue is sites will often see a temporary boost due to Google's little flaw that allows newly gained links to effect the sites SERP results. After Google scores and devalues (aka apply filters) the links, said site will typically fall back to normalized results. Google does not penalize often, but they do filter quite a bit. Good luck!
Excuse me -- But PAID LINKs have nothing to do with your site's fluctuating SERPs. Matt Cutts has categorically stated several times that --webmasters can always buy/sell links without getting penalized- Let me quote him from one of his blog-post- Most probably it is the ever changing Google algo ( I believe they are completely over-hauling the current one) --that is the cause for your fluctuations. I was working for one site for 6 months--and the best I could bring the site for two main keywords/phrases was 65th. I checked the terms again yesterday and one is ranking #3 --another is #7. Wonder-Wonder- I stopped working on the site for the last 2 months.
Google hasn't communicated anything in this regard. I guess the most logical explanation is what you suggest above, although I hope that's not the case and we'll be back to where we were on Friday... Thanks for you replies people!
Google does not communicate much on anything to be quite frank. They make everything a guessing game however I will say that you can search this forum alone and find 100s of threads under Google that say "I ranked on front page and am now gone" It is link popularity that props the sites up temporarily.... and it is poor link quality as determined by Google... that sees those same sites drop. but I could be wrong