Had a great niche site, and was ranking on the 1st page for some very competitive keywords after 2 months of SEO. Did the G00gle dance for a bit but finally ended up on page 1. One day, got slapped hard, and now the site is ranked 428, 300...crazy numbers like that. Any advice from those of you who had similar experiences? Should I invest more energy in the site?
If it was making you decent money then keep adding articles and concentrate on building higher quality (high pr) links and not just scrapebox spam.
How old is your site. Google is notorious for giving new sites a "honeymoon period", and then your site suddenly drops into oblivion. This is why I try to buy aged domains on all my projects now, especially in competitive niches. Did all of your terms drop? PM me your site and I will take a look at it.
Ya, I think scrapebox, Xrumer, Senuke, and programs like this are a thing of the past. Google is getting really good at sniffing out spammy link building.
Well, the site is fairly new, I mean it's from April of 2011. It was making decent money, and it is a kind of Wordpress-based adsense type site with many articles on it. Has a lot of backlinks to it, a lot of them manual links, some SB and AMR, as well as aritlces and YT vids. So you think I should keep on building links to it? Add articles?
if your website it's not old enough, don't expect to stick high for highly competitive keywords. Have you added content when it hit first page? Adding content it's the best link building right now, as google tends to rank higher websites with new content
I have been adding content, not as much as I should have, since I was working on backlinks more than content. Now that it's been slapped, any advice on where to go from here? Do sites come back to rank after having been slapped?
Depends on the penalty. From what I read the common consensus is 6 months, but I have read about people getting rankings back sooner and some not at all. Out of all my sites I had one that got hit with a -40 penalty. After trying to fix it up I just said F it, and I just started building a brand new site.
Hi, I would build some massive edu backlinks to get that baby ranking high again. But build them slowly.
Thanks for all the advice guys. My take-away from all this is that I'll build some more content to the site and consistently drip backlinks to the site to show G the site merits high ranking.
I would slow down on adding external links, maybe double check your onsite seo and make sure everything is in order.
Thanks Jimmy, I have the onsite SEO down pretty solid, it's based on a WP blog with the Clickbump theme, SEOPressor plugin, All-in-One-SEO plugin. It's all there. Hopefully it's enough and not too much. So just drip-feed articles, you say?