I was building some links to one of my sites with article directories id submit to like 10 of them the same article and id leave the link in my sig as http://www.YourSite.com I was told to use anchor text so I changed them all to my keywords and added the anchor text. A week later a bunch of my rankings jumped way up and I was getting more traffic but now I cant find any of my ranks and when I search for my site I dont find links from any article directories. Anyone know what I did wrong or the right way to do this. thanks, - Trevor
Google only shows a sample of your backlinks. So it is not surprising that the article directory links are not showing up. Perhaps you got too many links all using the exact link anchor text. This can sometimes result in a penalty. You need to vary your link anchor text to make your links look more natural. You should also vary your link building strategies so that you are getting links from many different sources.
Hey Vansterdam, I put my url in yahoo and found a couple of the articles. I just found it weird that they were showing in google a week ago. And I do have the anchor text varied a bit. I will probably get some more links and maybe google is just doing alittle dance. thanks, - Trevor
Don't be too worried if Google is not reporting all of your links. They always just show a sample of backlinks. This random sample can change from week to week. They are counting more links than just the ones they report to the public.
Google is bad at showing backlinks. They probably want to save you from your competitors who can get ideas about where you get backlinks from Use google webmaster tools to download a slightly more accurate (though outdated) version of your backlink profile.
Yep - the general rule is that Google DOES give seo credit for backlinks but they only display a very small sampling of them.
Perfect hopefully some of my ranks bounce back. Should I just keep building back links until I get to the first page?. - Trevor