Seeing a lot of negative movement in rankings over the last 7 days

nikolaalx

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I have been going back and forth through projects that I am working on and it seems that over the last 7 days my projects took a serious hit.

I am not talking about an isolated case where a project slipped some rankings. I am seeing a pattern here among my projects.
This is very concerning and my gut is telling me that the SEO as it was used to be done over the last 1-2 years (mainly based on the effectiveness of spun content and conventional tools that are being publicly used) is about to change.

There were 2 unconfirmed updates from Google (one on 15-17Jan and one over the recent days). Everyone in the industry noticed and reported the flux, only Google folks seem to have denied it. But again it's against their interest to share so that's why it would be constructive for us to share our experience on this.

I saw couple of threads already where people are confirming they saw massive drop in groups of 2 term keywords. This could imply that one of the updates was a tweak to the penguin update.

Another theory could be the diminished value in some of the conventional link building techniques (where by "diminished" I mean the already diminished value to actually turn into negative value).

So for example if you are doing article marketing with spun content, that could actually now hurt your site...whereas previously it was considered to have a very insignificant effect.

I would be very thankful to hear what other people are experiencing.

What I see is clusters of keywords disappear from the rankings...while others remain. The clusters usually are of the same gene and have a different third word addded to the main 2 term phrase.

Or in another thought that I have is that Google could be improving their overall algorithm and thus they are now much better at catching spun content. But if the latter is proven to be right , then that would mean that there would be a global impact on this community and many people would report a global drop in their project rankings.
 
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If you say what kind of backlinking you've done it would be easier to assess what might have happened to your rankings. I see you mention article marketing, is that all you're doing?
 
From what you are telling us I would rather conclude that it's a sort of keyword/anchor text based penalty or algo change.
What was your anchor text diversity on those affected websites?

Why are you assuming that it's a backling type issue?
 
Well if I have to classify the type of links::

- article dirs
- linkwheels / social sites
- some rss
- own network of blogs (high pagerank domains all on different class-c IPs)

Hand-spun content with at least 75% uniqueness (according to TBS)

As an anchor strategy I use a broad set of exact match anchors (about 70% of the total links) and remaining 30% on generic/brand/naked urls.

I have the feeling that due to the fact that I am using too broad set of anchors...there are groups that overlap (e.g. a group that encompasses "great widgets" + "third word").

So in the end If I have 30 variations for "great widgets"....e.g. "great widgets kw1", "great widgets kw2", "great widgets kw3"..etc could this update be focused towards 2 term anchor overlapping?

Just a random guess.

Was hoping could get some input from other people that are having problems and that are also seeing some patterns.
 
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