Backlinking gone wrong - How to fix? (Vague question)

Okay so I know what I'm about to ask is an incredibly vague, "asked a million times before" sort of question, but I'm going to ask it anyway

SO, I created a site around 5 ish months ago with the intention of marketing a Clickbank product (one that I've actually used, and liked!). I spent a good few weeks creating the content, branding the site, setting up social media, and generally turning it into a 'mini' authority site (I'm a design guy, so the whole 'branding' and 'content' areas are my forte).

My question is this - After doing almost no backlinking/off site SEO the site was sitting pretty for 3 or 4 keywords on around page 5 of Google. I thought 'great! Time to shoot some links to this bad boy and i'll be onto a winner'. After scouring the forums for weeks trying to decide my strategy for link building and diversification I jumped onto 2 of the more popular link building packages being sold here at BHW. I purchased the small versions of each, just a test as I didn't want to mess anything up - As you might have guessed link building and off site SEO is not my strong point!

Well, to cut a long story short, after the links started getting indexed, Google decided to drop my site waaaaayy out of the SERPS and its pretty much none existent for any keywords in the top 20 pages.

What the hell did I do wrong? I know link building, off site SEO etc. etc. is all fairly 'black hat' and a bit of a minefield, but I thought I was being fairly safe and smart?

My second question is this... Can you guys recommend anything I can do to remedy the situation?

Sorry, I have a tendency to ramble on a bit. I know this is so vague and nonsensical, but I guess I just need a little bit of personalised feedback.

Thanks guys,

M.

Oh, and just to add - I have since set up another site with content, branding etc. etc. and want to do a better job of ranking it this time so any advice on how to 'start again' would be highly appreciated also!

How long has it been since you purchased the links? I cant speak for everyone or say im a pro - but from my own experience i have seen some of my sites drop out of the top 100 after buying backlinks on BHW only for them to come back into the top 20 a month later.

One of my sites in particular is really strange, for months now the ranking of my main keywords has been out of control - one day they could be 15th then the next day they can be out of the top 100, really weird.

Well that might be a positive sign.. It must have been about 3 or 4 weeks ago now. May be a little longer. Do you think it might be wise to leave the site alone for a while? Well, add some more content, but leave the link building alone.

Just wandering if any one else has any thoughts on this? Apologies for bumping up my own thread

It could be anything OP. If your site had 0 backlinks and purchased a small package of say 50 links and the service provider blasted and indexed all 50 in one shot, it could be dangerous and seen as unnatural, however, if your website is still within the top 300 results, it's most probably not penalized and just dancing. Leave it for now, perhaps build some quality links in the meantime but don't check the serps again for the next 2 - 3 weeks until you decide to drop your project or not.

You'd need to let everyone know the volume of links, and you need to be building decent links right now. The dead giveaway is a spurt of links then zero linkbuilding after it, the rabbit in the headlights syndrome, oh no my site has dropped I better stop. I would go to majestic and even .on the free version it will give you the sites trust flow and citation flow, it's give a little indication as to the quality of the links. Ideally you want the trust and citation numbers close to each other if the trust is say 4 and citation is 20, that's not a good sign. Alot depends on the niche, competition etc. Some very good links should counter any issues. The majestic method is only a guide, it will however also give you the backlinks so you can check yourself. Even on the free version if you upload a text file to the site, you can download your link data.

Thanks guys. Really appreciate you taking the time to help me out. The issue you mentioned about the 'spurt' of links sounds about right. I'm planning to manually create some nice, high quality links over the next few weeks (just a few) and see where I can go from there. As you mentioned - it hasn't been de indexed, so it seems like theres a bit of a dance going on.

I've got plenty to research now though and plenty of stats and information to get my head around on Majestic. Thanks!

The real question is, what products did you buy here for your website to do this?

The Google Dance is very common. But for a website to completely drop off of google is just.....? Meh

iSki123 said:

The real question is, what products did you buy here for your website to do this?

The Google Dance is very common. But for a website to completely drop off of google is just.....? Meh

Click to expand...

That's what I thought.. Well, as for the links, they were 2 of the most popular packages you can buy on these forums. Each of them cost me somewhere around $100 and were designed to bring diversity to the backlink profile - Something I thought to be very important for a site with zero backlinks?

Hy, first of : analyse purchased backlinks, next just use google disavow tool to remove spammy, low authority backlinks. Sit back and relax