Significant drop in rankings after social bookmark submission

Hi Folks

I have recently started an aggressive link building strategy from various blogs and sites to my domain. I have noticed continuous increase in sales/ traffic and rankings over the last few months in proportion to the amount of links i have gotten however yesterday my traffic tanked to next to nothing and I have dropped to pages 9 and 10 for my keywords.

This all seems to have happened after I paid someone to do some social bookmarking..could this be the reason for drop..google suspects spamming?

If so how can I go about reversing the social book marks...or finding the route cause.

Cheers

Carl

 

Ouch
Sounds like a penalty.
But probally not what you think.
It is more likely that you have simply been visited by more bots and more algos by firing the juice you get more exposure.
As a guess you have outbounds on the site with some anchor to other sites.
It looks like you are link selling perphaps
Drop all outbound and ffile for reinclusion with an apology etc.
Generally is real hard to get a penalty from inbound.
If not please PM who you used as I will test fire it againt a few sites above me with no hesitation

 

Let me guess, this person did not vary your link anchor text, right? If you get lots of links with exactly the same link anchor text, then Google will likely give you a penalty for spam.

Resolving such a penalty is usually quite difficult. You may want to go back and either remove all those social bookmarks or at least change the anchor text of most of them. Other than that, I suggest you keep regularly building more backlinks with varied anchor text. In the end you may have to contact Google about the issue, but they might not be willing to do anything. If you do contact Google, admitting you paid someone to do social bookmarking may be a bad idea. This is a spammy practice that they might look down upon.

 

Yes, this can be a penalty. Usually this doesn't happen with Social Bookmarking sites, but Google may think that your traffic is spam.

 

too many links too fast doesn't look natural to Google

 

I dont have any outbound links on the site and Im not selling links so i doubt it is that. I think that I have been building links a little to fast..im still indexed just dropped to low pages. Will I be able to recover from this and does anyone know if there is anyone I could get to help me out of this problem?

 

Sometimes these severe sudden drops in rankings are only temporary, and the previous higher rankings return after a few days. This happened to one of my sites recently, but now it's back to what it was before.

The reason for these temporary drops is unknown, but may be some kind of glitch in Google's data analysis methods.

 

yes it could b penalty.but social book marking has no role in this penalty its google's eye that took it spamming.

 

If penalty because of selling links with dofollow, you might lost your page rank too. Is your page rank is still there? First, identify, the cause of penalty.

 

If penalty because of selling links with dofollow, you might lost your page rank too. Is your page rank is still there? First, identify, the cause of penalty.

 

If penalty because of selling links with dofollow, you might lost your page rank too. Is your page rank is still there? First, identify, the cause of penalty.

 

check the anchor text used in the backlinks you commissioned.

If they are all the same, or simple variations, that is a big red flag.

You have to keep it looking natural.

 

Oh ho....

Sounds like a penalty!

Check your webmaster tools account? - look for the reinclusion request (changed name now???)

Did you get someone to put LOTS of links with the same anchorage by chance?

 

I kind of have the same trouble but have not bought links lately, or bookmarked this one site in awhile but still got zapped on PR. My best Bid directory has over 76,000 backlinks but kicked back to a PR nothing. Seen alot of bid directories get the axe. Don't know why. Had a good thing going in that one but still make sales in my other directories

 

You may have been penalized for massive link building with a specific number of keyword(s).

When you link build, try to deeplink and use different keywords to prevent this from happening in the future.

 

I have a question. Everyone is telling to make anchor texts different. But what about forum signatures - they result in hundreds of links with same anchor text.

 

I think any one of the answers above could be the culprit. Also, I had a problem once where a blog was so over-optimized that it dropped it totally plummetted off of google.

To the last poster, I don't think forum linking strategies really work all that well imho.

 

I recently was on page 1 of google for 8 months for all my keywords and then in Jan all my keyword results now show up on page 6 and i have no idea why. I've recently cleaned up my site to make it more cleaner, less keyword spammy, taken off any external links, made sure the page loads faster, made sure my blog loads faster. Also another thing to check is if you have any errors in your site map

 

I think this happens as a result of massive link building for one targeted keyword within a short period of time. Social bookmarking never drops a PR.

 

Every time you change your keyword mix in your anchor text it has the potential to change your ranking. For example. Let say you are ranking high for a keyword Blue Widget. Then you get a bunch of links for Blue Widget and a few more for Widgets for Sale.

Google now has new information about your site based on the incoming anchor text. So it automatically adjusts. Something as small as this: Bike vs Bicycle, Car vs Automobile, can change your placement. The top rankings are highly competitive and easily subject to changes.

So that could be a factor. And algorithmic change could be a factor. Or you could be caught in a filter.

When I have a site ranking I let it sit until it starts to fall. The if it ain't broke don't fix it can really apply here. And while you have no control over who or how someone links to you, it can still effect your placement even if you don't want it to.

If you are in a super competitive category and your competitors have the resources to do so they can also effect your rankings. Once you get on the front page of any competitive phrase you become a target, but that's business.