Evil black hat and the sandbox

[claude5670]

I have been a member of this forum for some time lurking around and reading the particular reason, I started reading. I have several web sites about six months ago one of my web sites ranked on the first page of Google disappeared to the 18th page.

Another web site that I had also on the first page of Google ended up on the 22nd page one morning. About two months ago

The sites are in small niches and had been ranked there for quite some time.

So I set out to find out what happened.

I am already quite familiar with a lot of techniques so I suspected What had happened. I wanted to find out if there was a way to protect myself from it happening again

The best way to find out if I could protect yourself I had to find out if I could do it that is destroy a site ranking.

I built a couple of small sites on some small niches got them up to the first page on Google.

I picked a couplet of niches that I had tried in the past and they were not profitable for me. So when I try to destroy them it would not break my heart.

It took about 2 1/2 weeks to get them up on the first page.

And then I went to work there's a few things I tried but it did not really affect the one site that much.

I had to do this all from my desktop no ftp. access to the site at all

I was able to do it with the second site quite dramatically.

You can see by the picture I uploaded I was getting about 90 visitors a day in this little niche.

I then took it out from my desktop it is now on page 18 and you can see the traffic went down to 27 visitors on the 9 of October and now zero on the 10th of October.

So now I know how to destroy somebody's rankings the best way that I found was to start adding back links relative back links work better increase their velocity start out with 10 or 20 a day next day 40 to 50 a day

Increase it to 300 and 500.

During this time the site will actually start to do better.This process is about a weeklong the site will continue to rank well as long as you do not it is the sudden stop that kills it the velocity simply ending.

Go from 400 to 500 links a day to 0

Two days later the site was on page 18.

My question still remains though is there a way to protect myself I haven't found one.

 

[aliskorn]

Thanks for the case study...but maybe you would still get sandboxed if you continue to build backlinks that fast because the websites are very new.I mean,maybe it`s a coincidence. Oh,and you have to tell me how you got 400 links in one day

 

[claude5670]

The sites that I have built to test this out are the same type of sites I built quite often they do not get sandbox.

I have sites built the same way that are quite stable and state in that position and are still there.

So I know these methods worked Google has never sandbox me.

It had to be an outside influence that is why I tested.

As for link building I could talk about it but I believe there are other threads devoted to that so I might go there and talk about it.

Hope you don't mind I just want try to keep this on subject.

 

[ewex]

Great case study...but what type of links were you building? The quality of the links matters for negative SEO.

 

[claude5670]

To take The site down it was more a question of the velocity of the link building coming to a stop.

I tried different types of links coming from good PR web sites and proper anchor text.

Even had a .gov in their as long as the increment are stable the site remains.

I've tested this as well the with the other site. It keeped ranking quite high as long as I keeped giving it hundreds of links.

But I can't maintain that the day I stoped, two days later that site was no more.

 

[Loak]

you dont burst build unless you KNOW that google will ban your ass, if you want long term goals then 10,000 backlinks a week at the most.

 

[claude5670]

The reason I started this thread is that I want to know if there is a way to protect myself from someone else doing this to me and again.

 

[kandor]

I believe it can easily be stopped if you have some link building included in your plan.

If you build say 10 links / day to the site that you rank for it will get a stable rank.
But the point is to not ever stop. have 10 links / day.
Then if someone will do negative seo on you, your site will jump to better ranking, but then after this someone will stop, google will see the 10 links / day to continue come in.

So then you will get your old ranking back.

I think that is the main issue with link building, that usually people stop building as soon as they get a good enough rank.

Kandor

The reason I started this thread is that I want to know if there is a way to protect myself from someone else doing this to me and again.

 

[jetton]

I believe it can easily be stopped if you have some link building included in your plan.

If you build say 10 links / day to the site that you rank for it will get a stable rank.
But the point is to not ever stop. have 10 links / day.
Then if someone will do negative seo on you, your site will jump to better ranking, but then after this someone will stop, google will see the 10 links / day to continue come in.

So then you will get your old ranking back.

I think that is the main issue with link building, that usually people stop building as soon as they get a good enough rank.

Kandor

Ok. So Claude is saying someone sabotaged him by linking umpteen million links to his site in a short time and then abruptly stopping... making it look like Claude was doing something that wasn't on the up and up, thus dropping his rank from page 1 to 18. He is asking how to stop someone from doing this in the future since (a) he doesn't know who this person(s) was and (b) he has no control over what others do. So, if I understand Kandor correctly, then by adding a small amount of links a day... in your estimate 10 or so... then if someone does come along to sabotage Claude then there will be a link burst but his safety net is the 10 links being added every day... showing that the site is steady and the influx of the other links was an annomily (in big G's eyes), thus keeping him from getting sandboxed. Is that correct?

 

[itmark]

But a quick question. Will it be possible to jump start the site again?
Can you get it out of the sandbox if you start adding link to it again?

 

[kandor]

A sandbox is only temporary, so yes.

But it will be very difficult to get sandboxed if you do start your campaign with a normal amount of links / day and even after a burst you just loose position back to what you had before the burst.

But usually what most people do is they build links, even if slow, they stop building as soon as they rank good enough.

Kandor

 

[claude5670]

I agree that I had not been building links on this site that was sabotaged but I was keeping a close eye on it and if I would've started to go down and ranking I would've started back linking slowly to get it back up.

But to go from page 1 to page 18 when the site had been up on page 1 for almost a year and a half that hurt.

 

[kandor]

I totally understand that it hurts.

But think of it this way, if a site gets its ranking and nothing happens after that it stays there because google does not look back anymore about the ranking.

But then all for a sudden, you get a lot of links, so google says hey, this page is important and popular.
You get higher ranking. then it stops getting links.
Google now takes a new look at it. Hmm this site lost its popularity and there is 100 other sites that are regularly getting new links, so we need to rank them higher now.

But if you build a site and always have link building included in the maintenance plan you will be having a strong position and the only sites beeting you will be those that are more popular.

Now lets look at a highly saturated niche
Viagra

Keyword "buy viagra" has 13.9 million competitors for this keyword.
The top 6 positions for this keyword have links looking this way

position 1: total links 591, age in months of the domain 81, new links / month 7.3, and that is the links the search engines do report back on.

position 2: total links 2133, age in months 46, new links / month 46

position 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjGY_PFbW7A
total links 9362677, age in month 142, new links / month 65934

So if position 3 would stop getting that many links / month it will dissapear from the search, while position 1 does not need that many because it was more relevant from beginning and the link building has been a steady coming one.

Hope it makes sense.

Kandor

I agree that I had not been building links on this site that was sabotaged but I was keeping a close eye on it and if I would've started to go down and ranking I would've started back linking slowly to get it back up.

But to go from page 1 to page 18 when the site had been up on page 1 for almost a year and a half that hurt.

 

[catchme]

You can easily skip the sandbox time, just the way i do it.
Buy old domains. Use domain listing service like justdropped[dot]com.
After you find the name you like, check the domain age in web[dot]archive[dot]org

The other thing that you should know about old domain names is that they rank better (true). If optimized better

And don't over do the link building, Google will get you banned/penalized, still.

 

[claude5670]

Kandor

I understand what you are saying about the links let's take a look at the number one Viagra example you provided and thank you by the way.

Do you believe if I threw let's say 200 to 500 links a day on that site for two weeks straight and then stopped Google will say it's OK they're still getting those 7.3 links a month.

Or do you believe that it's an automated procedure measuring the velocity of the link building and wen it stops it raises a red flag.

The reason I am saying this is because when I first started to sabotage my own site I started with sites that had PR 0 and they did nott have that much effect even when I stopped them.

When I started experimenting with sites that had PR's 3 and up and stop those inbound links that's when it got some attention.
I not saying I couldn't have done it with PR zero links just probably would have had to give a lot more links to have the same effect.

catchme
The site that was sabotaged on me was over 3 1/2 years old But tanks I will take that into consideration to build my next site

 

[kandor]

As that page is allready nr1 his ranking would not change, but he probebly would get a manual review, and if not, nothing would happen to his ranking as long as new links in the speed as before would continue to come.

His ranking can drop very temporarily like during 1 day or more, but highly unlikely that anything would happen as they have a good linking structure and continue to get them at all times.

So this could hurt your site if it is a cloaked or doorway site, but otherwise it is pretty secure.
And the site that you have got sandboxed can get its ranking back if you start to work on the links to it again.
It will take a bit longer time as it has not got any new links for a while now.

This is my experience anyway. as we all know SEO is not exact science beside if you work for a search engine and have direct access to their algorithms, that would only make it exact science for that search engine alone.

Kandor

Kandor

I understand what you are saying about the links let's take a look at the number one Viagra example you provided and thank you by the way.

Do you believe if I threw let's say 200 to 500 links a day on that site for two weeks straight and then stopped Google will say it's OK they're still getting those 7.3 links a month.

Or do you believe that it's an automated procedure measuring the velocity of the link building and wen it stops it raises a red flag.

The reason I am saying this is because when I first started to sabotage my own site I started with sites that had PR 0 and they did nott have that much effect even when I stopped them.

When I started experimenting with sites that had PR's 3 and up and stop those inbound links that's when it got some attention.
I not saying I couldn't have done it with PR zero links just probably would have had to give a lot more links to have the same effect.

catchme
The site that was sabotaged on me was over 3 1/2 years old But tanks I will take that into consideration to build my next site