$400 Site Gone

I had a few small review type sites ranking on the first page of google. I had bought only one PR3 link for each of them all from the same directory a while ago (dumb but I was new to IM at the time)

Anyway only 2 of the sites homepages yesterday completely dropped off of google, however they were the only two actually making me money. One of them was making me about $200-400 a month.

Why were both sites hit all of a sudden? And if it is because of a footprint from the paid link, do I now need to change hosts? Is every site I make now gonna get penalized (all my sites are on one hostgator account) Can the sites recover?

Had you recently built new links to those sites?

The disappearing phenomenon can set in after new links are detected, but the good news (assuming that's what happened) is that it almost always bounces back stronger once it does reappear in the SERPs again.

No this site literally only had 1 backlink from a paid directory. That was made about 1.5 months ago.

Is is it still indexed? Could be a dance. If it's 100% deindexed check your message console in webmaster and see whats up and if you see nothing resubmit it.

fxphil said:

Is is it still indexed? Could be a dance. If it's 100% deindexed check your message console in webmaster and see whats up and if you see nothing resubmit it.

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It can still be found via site:mydomain.com so its not totally de-indexed. I thought a dance only happened when the site was relatively new. I have not touched it in 1.5 months. No backlinking nothing new besides the 1 backlink when I made it 2 months ago.

Are you sure that your paid links still exists and are in same place, and not for example dropped to some inner page in the directory?

Well then I agree with the next comment. See what happen to the links and also see if you got hit by neg seo. Also you may be starting competition within the niche see if someone has all the suddenly outranked you. Usually/sometimes when one of these churn and burns comes into play they will gain rankings fast, moving all the other sites around. Have you check to see if the positions that were once ahead and behind your ranking got moved too?

InsanelySane said:

It can still be found via site:mydomain.com so its not totally de-indexed. I thought a dance only happened when the site was relatively new. I have not touched it in 1.5 months. No backlinking nothing new besides the 1 backlink when I made it 2 months ago.

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Checked directory, link is still there.

All other sites are in their original places on google except mine. Like I said my privacy policy page is ranking on page 2. However, my homepage is gone. Not even in the first 50 pages of google. This has too be some kind of penalty right? Is there a way to check?

OP, your story doesn't line up.
You said you purchased the link(s) when you were new to IM, "a while ago".
Your sites are earning $200-400/month.
Yet, in your next post, you state that the link was purchased 1.5 months ago.
If you're new to IM, and create websites that generate that kind of revenue in under 2 months, then I tip my hat to you.

Anyway, what you're speaking of, sounds like Google Dance. Nothing to really be worried about, unless there's more to this story, which I'm feeling there is.

Tosmekop said:

OP, your story doesn't line up.
You said you purchased the link(s) when you were new to IM, "a while ago".
Your sites are earning $200-400/month.
Yet, in your next post, you state that the link was purchased 1.5 months ago.
If you're new to IM, and create websites that generate that kind of revenue in under 2 months, then I tip my hat to you.

Anyway, what you're speaking of, sounds like Google Dance. Nothing to really be worried about, unless there's more to this story, which I'm feeling there is.

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Your detective skills are good, I am being straight with you though...I wrote the post rather fast so I there were some errors.

I have really only been at IM since this Christmas. So 1.5 months ish. I published the site exactly 25 days ago (checked the wp dashboard).

The site took about a week or maybe close to two weeks to rank on the first page and stay there.

The past 2 weeks it earned me 160$ so the 200-400$ a month was a projection with 400$ being optimistic.

I released another site similar literally 5 days ago, the very next morning it somehow made me $30 (well I know how it just surprised me 12hrs after hitting publish), to my surprise it was on the 2nd page of google. Later that day however the homepage was de-indexed from google (still at yahoo though). However, the privacy policy was still indexed in google and ranking on the 4th page. The next day the homepage was re-indexed but still was not ranking well in google. Some days I can find it on the third page while some days its completely gone? Its weird IDK why.

Anyway today I check my 25 day old site that was holding position 6# for the past 2 weeks and the same thing happened. Homepage is indexed but is not on the first 50 pages, however the privacy policy is on the 2nd page.

Both sites had only 1 link from the same directory.

I owe the conversions to my articles because I personally write them.

If you could tell me what you think is happening that would be great. I'm kind of in a paralysis because I am worried that google is targeting my whole network and all my sites I make/have made are going to get de-indexed.

The fact that 2 different similarily built but completely different topic and keyword sites got de-indexed at nearly the exact same time worries me.

I always thought "the google" dance happened when the site was brand new and moving around. The site was a solid 6th place for 2 weeks. The dance makes sense for the 5 day old site but not the new one.

Are you sure? Thanks for the help

This is unfortunate. You'll be surprised how little changes in a website could dramatically alter rankings. If you have a way to back-up your site to before, attempt that and see if it changes.

tkirk said:

This is unfortunate. You'll be surprised how little changes in a website could dramatically alter rankings. If you have a way to back-up your site to before, attempt that and see if it changes.

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-__- nothing was changed though....checking majestic no new links either....

As your sites are so new this sounds very typical google dance and should settle down by itself.

tony_d said:

Had you recently built new links to those sites?

The disappearing phenomenon can set in after new links are detected, but the good news (assuming that's what happened) is that it almost always bounces back stronger once it does reappear in the SERPs again.

Click to expand...

exactly this happen to one of my site after every link building package i purchased,didn;t disappeared totally but dropped 1-2-3 pages then it was coming back more stronger,is what happened 2 days again and today it start coming back,i will have to see if it will be stronger this time too.

the proper way to see if your site is still indexed is to search for "info:mydomain.com" , not "site:mydomain.com"

the "site:mydomain.com" purely restricts searches to that domain so you could be deindexed but google still brings back results...

for example when I search for "info:mydomain.com" for a deindexed site of mine it just brings back a link to that sites [it has thousands of links when i do a "link:mydomain.com"] but when I search for "site:mydomain.com" it brings me all the pages. The site has a manual spam action in WMT.

InsanelySane said:

It can still be found via site:mydomain.com so its not totally de-indexed. I thought a dance only happened when the site was relatively new. I have not touched it in 1.5 months. No backlinking nothing new besides the 1 backlink when I made it 2 months ago.

Click to expand...

lmxftw said:

the proper way to see if your site is still indexed is to search for "info:mydomain.com" , not "site:mydomain.com"

the "site:mydomain.com" purely restricts searches to that domain so you could be deindexed but google still brings back results...

for example when I search for "info:mydomain.com" for a deindexed site of mine it just brings back a link to that sites [it has thousands of links when i do a "link:mydomain.com"] but when I search for "site:mydomain.com" it brings me all the pages. The site has a manual spam action in WMT.

Click to expand...

This is driving me nuts.

info:domain still shows my site....My site's privacy policy is ranking on the 2nd page for its primary keyword. Does this mean ONLY the homepage was hit? Does this indicate a dance or a penalty? As the link was only pointing to the homepage.

Who's buying links from directories these days? Better invest that money you earn for your own PBN

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.

I've seen spammed to death crappy links rank a site for months. If your site is still indexed, your in the clear, just continue adding links. I've been in your situation before and spazzed out, but its nothing to worry about. Carry on and continue adding links.