Hi all, Recently I spent $1k for buying links from about 8-9 reputable link directories (Yahoo, JoeAnt, References.net, HotVsNot, etc) Shortly after that my PR went up to 5 (used to be 4) and I lost ranks for ALL keywords.. Should I disavow all those purchased links??? How long should I wait before taking any action ?
I would say definitely don't do anything right away. I wouldn't be too bothered about looking at PR as an indicator of the success of your site, PR can be very slow to update and there are many many other more important factors that decide your ranking other than PR. I think your problem is unlikely to be your directory links but here's some ideas on how to tackle this. Take a look at your Google Analytics and Webmaster tools. Can you pinpoint the date your ranks and traffic dropped? Does this coincide with the date of an algorithm change? (Check http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change). Did you get any messages in Webmaster Tools? This might help you start to figure out if you were hit by the Panda or Penguin Algo changes or if you have had some kind of penalty applied. If they do coincide with an algo change then just Google Panda or Penguin recovery to get some advice on how to tackle this. The last algo change was on November 5th and it was a Panda refresh so if it happened around then your problem is likely more content based than link based. Google the URL of the pages where you directory links appear. Do they show up in Google? If not maybe Google doesn't like that directory so much :| As for the disavow tool. The general advice is only to use this if you have received a message from Google about your link profile and then only after you have tried to have the links removed from the sites in question. Overall I would say respond very slowly to changes, sometimes things just level out on their own. If not take very slow, well recorded and granular steps to try and fix your situation so you can look back and see what helped. Good luck!
LynnKerr - thanks for a straight to the point answer. You precisely summarized a lot of assumptions I had
Also, I lost rankings on November 4th and Google released Panda Update 21 on November 5, which affected 1% of US queries.. Can it be that I got hit by this update?