Huge drop in rankings for specific keywords

trees426 said:

Hello BHW!

I have been building guest post and niche edit links that I've purchased here and used exact match anchors for the keywords I want to rank for.

I always make sure the websites have more than 1k/mo traffic (usually a lot higher, I've paid $100-$150ea for most of the links) and are related to my niche.

It's been working pretty well until this week.

I just got an update from Ahrefs that I dropped 30-60+ in rankings for multiple keywords that I was "exact match anchor" link building on.

And it happened to multiple pages. The pages kept their rankings for all of the other keywords that they started ranking for during the link-building process, just not the keyword I used the exact match in the anchors.

I'm unsure of what to make of it, how to fix it, or how to change my strategy moving forward.

Perhaps someone will have some insight; otherwise, I just wanted to let you guys know what happened so it doesn't happen to you!

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DeadJoe said:

You used exact match anchors ... unless you already had a ton of other links going to your existing pages, building exact match is why you are fucked. Ask the sellers if they can edit the anchor text and set it to something more natural.

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trees426 said:

i will do that, lesson learned!

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trees426 said:

Hello BHW!

I have been building guest post and niche edit links that I've purchased here and used exact match anchors for the keywords I want to rank for.

I always make sure the websites have more than 1k/mo traffic (usually a lot higher, I've paid $100-$150ea for most of the links) and are related to my niche.

It's been working pretty well until this week.

I just got an update from Ahrefs that I dropped 30-60+ in rankings for multiple keywords that I was "exact match anchor" link building on.

And it happened to multiple pages. The pages kept their rankings for all of the other keywords that they started ranking for during the link-building process, just not the keyword I used the exact match in the anchors.

I'm unsure of what to make of it, how to fix it, or how to change my strategy moving forward.

Perhaps someone will have some insight; otherwise, I just wanted to let you guys know what happened so it doesn't happen to you!

Click to expand...

HenryObi said:

The drop doesn't seem like it was as a result of content or just a more powerful site outranking you. Try diversify your anchor texts a bit so as to not look spammy. Lots of exact match anchor is never good.

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