So what do you do when you DON'T have spammy links?
Or maybe I'm not understanding what a spammy link is.
But my site lost rankings for 11 days, rankings came back for a day, then they fell
again, and now they're all just dancing like crazy. The strangest thing though, my
most competitive keyword has stayed #1, a couple of others have stayed in
positions 5 and 7, but the rest are dancing.
All the links that *I* did were done manually. I did lots of blogger posts, wordpress
and bought some .coms, filled them out with content and got links from those as
well. They are all contextual links.
However, I DID outsource SEO on the site after a while, and as far as I know the
guy I use is one of the best out there. He ranks sites fast with his own network,
hides all his links, and my oldest site with him has been ranking for 2 years and
survived all the updates.
Whats also odd, the site that got hit was the only site that I personally build links
to. But at the same time I never spammed the site so I have no idea why its
dancing.
What exactly is a spammy link? And this may be a stupid question but I have to ask.
There are SEO services out there who own HUGE private networks. And some of
these guys block their links from ahrefs, majestic and other SEO tools. In order to
hide their links from competitors. But naturally you can't hide a link from Google.
I am curious if Google can tell when a backlink is being hidden in this manner?
And if they can, wouldn't that give them a great reason to penalize sites those links
point to?
The reason I ask is because I've only known about this technique for like 6 months.
So I'm wondering if this update may be targeting "hidden links" from private networks.
I just can't imagine than any of my own links got the site in trouble, at the same time,
I don't want to blame my provider. My sites have survived
all other updates, so I'm
puzzled how or why this one got me.
I realize Google is volatile by nature, but it does have an aglo. So my simplest question
would be, does ANYONE know wtf this algo was targeting? How long does it take
before there is some type of mass consensus?
-SB