Decrease in rankings

Backstory: I have a niche website that was ranking #1 for about 10 keywords, in the top 10 for about 35 keywords, in the top 100 for about 150 more. The site is a few months old, so I finally decided to build a few links to it. This site has several other older domains redirected to it, so it's got a pretty decent authority rank of 64, these sites were all in my niche, but I've consolidated them into this one site. So, I figured I could make a reasonable amount of links pretty safely. I used a wide variety of anchor texts, including 'click here' and branded anchor text links, etc...to 50 different inner pages and hit each one with about 50-60 links.

And...immediate dropping of rankings. Like, within 2 hours. This was on Thursday, and now it's Sunday. Everything has tanked. Some of the keywords I was #1 for are now ranging from #9 to out of the top 100. Keywords I was about #20 for are in the 50s to out of the top 100. This is across the board. Not one thing has gone up. I realize the positive effects of a link should take some time, so I wasn't expecting a huge bump right away, but I really wasn't expecting this massive drop. It doesn't matter if I sent any links to the page or not or if I used the keyword as anchor text or not. Every keyword has dropped.

Is this normal? I've never had this happen before, so this is probably a huge noob question. Thanks for any advice you can give.

Hi,

So basicly you built 60 links for 50 different inner pages = 3000 links, how was the velocity while building those links ? and what kind of links were they ?

However, don't worry to much as sudden rise of backlinks often results in a dance , hopefully your website is going to rise up soon with greater ranking.

Thanks for the reply. Now that you did the math, I guess it must have been more like 15-20 links each. It was 900 total I built and it was probably a little quicker than I would have liked, just over a couple days. I fully expected a drop in rankings for the pages I linked to, especially for the keywords I used, but I'd never seen everything drop like this, even for the pages I didn't build any links to and for basically any keyword combination I'd previously ranked for. That's the part that is confusing to me.

The links were a mix of web 2.0 profiles, forum comments, wiki links, a bunch of google+, etc.

It was more than likely the penguin update that did the damage

Its too early to say yet
some sites are tarting to come back
Hopefully yours is one of them

You realise you can dilute your anchor too much ,and you realise penguin 2.1 was released around them as well right?

I agree a rise of backlinks can cause what is happening. Tip always start building links to a new site as soon as it is live(if you intend to carry out serious linkbuilding on the site), do it slowly to start with and gradually built it up or maintain the average velocity.If you suddenly did 3k of links and evenly distributed them across all the pages, you may have a problem.
The home page should always have more links than inner pages, so all pages having a very similar amount of links is un-natural for the average site.

With the rankings you have any seo would have VERY slowly introduced links, 3k at once, you may well have screwed up big time. You have no option but to wait now. I have sites ranking #1 no backlinks for 2 years, I leave them well alone until a time comes I need to linkbuild to them. I may add like, 1 top end link every 6 months, if any. I'd never fire 3k of links out the blue. You may get lucky and google will simply ignore them and your rank will get restored.

Good luck either way.

Pretty sure it's purely terrible timing... Ties in with the start of penguin 2.1.. And just coincidence... Just be patient and wait a week.. Just carry on as normal, don't make any rash changes.

Okay, you're welcome mate,

The serps are shuffling heavily these days, you should really wait , I wouldn't worry too much in your case and I'm confident that your ranking will come back stronger.

Were the 301 domains already penalized ? I'm asking because many people reported that the penalty is flying throught the 301.

Yeah, could be. I thought penguin/hummingbird or whatever was Friday though? This happened Thursday. But you still could be right.

I'd say that you did too much links in short period of time, though it's best to wait first and then make any judgement.

My few site are increasing and few are decreasing after update

So, I double checked my redirected websites and you were right, one of my domains had received a penalty from Google for:Thin content with little or no added value

This site appears to contain a significant percentage of low-quality or shallow pages which do not provide users with much added value (such as thin affiliate pages, cookie-cutter sites, doorway pages, automatically generated content, or copied content).


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I had always thought that this was completely a myth, because what's to stop me from buying 10 penalized sites and redirecting them to my biggest competitors and giving them a penalty. Right? I mean, that doesn't make any sense to me that it's just that easy to completely tank somebody's website.

The only reason I had bought the stupid domain is it's PR5, so I thought it was probably okay to build a few links and redirect it. Anyway, guess I was wrong on both counts.

Anyway, thanks for all the information and help y'all!

edit: spelin

nishat said:

My few site are increasing and few are decreasing after update

Click to expand...

Well you are a scholar. Thanks for bringing that to everyone's attention. I wasn't sure how the rankings happened, but now I know.

Mate it sounds more like the algorithm update rather than the 301 redirect tanking your sites rankings like that.

The fact that you had built all those links and your rankings tanked right after was coincidence. I'd start by cleaning up your current backlink profile first for your primary domain getting rid of hte low quality links and then see what happens.

An update for anybody who cares. (It always annoys me when I google a question, find a thread and the OP never comes back to let anybody know what happened. I'm trying not to be that guy.)

My problem was that one of the 301 domains I had redirected had a pretty spammy backlink profile. 70% exact match for a wide variety of keywords in my niche. I've removed all the redirects and I assume that when google crawls the situation, at least some traffic will come back. (Then again, I was ranking partially based on that spammy keyword profile.)