$400 Site Gone

Laubster · Feb 5, 2014

Your site could be over-optimized in the onsite SEO department, but have ranked high for a short time b/c of the freshness factor. When you see internal pages ranking higher than the homepage should, or the homepage ranking when internal pages should, it's because your onsite is over optimized. Check out PHPBuilt's onsite SEO guide for more info: www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/631067-phpbuilts-idiot-proof-guide-authority-site-building.html

Rua999 · Feb 5, 2014

danalytics said:
I'm seeing a lot of misconceptions so here's my opinions/experience:

1. You don't get penalized from 1 link no matter what. Period. If your site literally has 1 link I can GUARANTEE it's not penalized no matter what link it is. If it was just a general directory link, I can also guarantee you're not going to see any kind of positive rankings from that because it's a worthless link. If your site was new, it was ranking because it was new, or some other reason, not the 1 link...

2. New sites get a natural boost in Google SERPs just by being new. After a period of time they drop down, particularly if there's nothing happening with the site (no new links/content etc...). That's not a penalty, that's Google saying "this site is insignificant".

3. Changing web hosts does nothing so don't bother. If your site actually was penalized (which is it not, based on what you explained), it is the domain name that has the penalty, not the host. This can be cleaned up, but in your case there's nothing to clean up.

Completely agree with points 2 and 3.. but i would say 1 link can temporarily penalize you if that is the only link you have it's an exact match anchor text. When a penguin refresh comes along and sees 100% exact match anchor text it can and does penalize new sites that don't have their anchor text ratios in order.. and when they get it in order.. provided none of the links are from sources of spam it pops back up again on the next refresh.. or so i've seen anyway.

But i highly doubt that one backlink is your problem.. you were most likely getting a boost because the site was new.

InsanelySane · Feb 5, 2014

Wow, I dont know if i missed this before or if it takes time to update. According to Majestic the directory link was "deleted" as of Feb 2. The exact day the site dropped.

Okay what does this typically mean? Did the directory delete the link or did google "delete" it?

If the link was deleted I dont understand why the hompage dropped off the face of the earth, yet the pr0 privacy policy is ranking? I would think the homepage would just be pushed to the second page near the privacy policy.

Thanks for the help so far guys, but what does link deletion in this scenario typically mean?

danalytics · Feb 8, 2014

Google doesn't delete links. The directory did and that's a good thing.

You're wasting time obsessing over 1 link (now 0) which was neither ranking nor penalizing your site.

You were ranking based on how Google gives new sites exposure regardless of links to see if they have any organic value. The amazing part is how you made $400 just from that. Now that that's over, you actually need SEO (links) to rank... Until then, your privacy policy page is just as significant as any other page.

$400 Site Gone

Laubster

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Rua999

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InsanelySane

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danalytics

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