What am I doing wrong here??

I could really use some help, advice or recommendations on how to get back some of my Google rankings.

One of my sites (www.AmazingLoveQuotes.org) has been established for several years now and I used to have a few pages that did pretty well in Google search. One or two in particular ranked for several different keyphrases and would drive in several hundred hits a day. However, over the past year or so things have gradually declined. At first (sometime around mid-year last year I would say) I thought maybe some of my pages were just sandboxed or Google was going through an update and things would come back up. After a couple of months I decided some changes needed to be done because things weren't improving. I started working on improving my "Experience" in Google Search Console. I changed my theme to an AMP theme and got that all setup, then I utilized Hummingbird to get my Page Experience and Core Web Vitals up as well. As you can see from the screenshot below, those are all green and look to be okay..



Considering those were red before, I thought maybe this would do the trick, but I still wasn't seeing improvement. Keep in mind, I've continuously built backlinks to my site ever since I launched it several years ago. So, from before my rankings dropped all the way until today, I've steadily bought/built different incoming links to my site. You can see that my Majestic rating isn't the best (Trust Flow: 23 and Citation Flow: 35), but both of my scores have at least increased over the years. In fact, both were lower last year when I was ranking for lots of different keyphrases.

Now here I am today, with my rankings still continuing to go downward. Out of frustration and feeling like I don't even know what to do anymore, it's caused me to create less content this year and build fewer links. At this point in time my backlink count has started to drop some because I haven't been building new ones, but I feel like that couldn't be the issue here as this was happening while I was still building more incoming links. Just look at this screenshot from Ahrefs:

LAST 30 DAYS:


LAST 12 MONTHS:


Does anyone have any idea what might have caused this or how I can determine what has caused this? It seems like everything I look at has actually improved over the past year (my Vitals...my Majestic scores..more Content..etc) but Google has been pushing my site the other direction. Any advice or suggestions would be great because frankly, I'm not really sure what else to try at this point...

 

Have a look at your competitors and check your keywords and keyword density compared to there's.

 

You say you bought links? The days of safely buying links has long passed.

For future reference, as SOON as your ranking goes down, begin reversing everything you have recently done. And that may include disavowing links.

 

Thanks for the replies and suggestions everyone! @Zone06 what do you recommend for looking at competitors? I use the Yoast SEO plugin to try and make sure my keyword density is good and although I haven't looked at my competitors, I think my density should be good based on the length of all articles because this is something I check with Yoast SEO.

@Oso Optimized the links I have purchased are always blog content links. I looked at these similar to how I would look at guest posting/blogging. Wouldn't it be similar to doing guest posting? A one way link from inside of a blog article. What safer methods would you recommend for building links from here on out? Also, is there any tool you would recommend for determining if any of the links I currently have should be disavowed?

Thanks again everyone!!

 

Google Policy, is if they know a link is purchased, you are penalized. Now what that means is up for debate. Many believe that you simply do not get credit for the link, but several years back it was proven in one of my old forums that you are in addition, penalized. This began the birth of the disavow list.
There is no easy way to build links. Google prefers we accrue links naturally, and some SEOs focus on creating link bait.

But if you click on the link in my signature, you can get a free software trial with WebCEO. Among the many reports they provide, one is related to link quality.

 

Exactly. If you have bought links recently then the best course of action is to start disavowing them. Maybe after that, you will start ranking for those keywords again.

 

Thanks for the replies everyone! I'll start going through some of my backlinks and see which ones were built around mid last year and try disavowing them.