Got a question and comments, First off, I really think Extrawinner is on to something with the content and minimal backlinks. Now, I know mathematically no one knows the true Google Algorithm. I have been looking at several sites pertaining to the latest Google Panda/Farmer update.
I see they have hit Content Farms (Ezinearticle and Go Articles) and autoblog scraped type sites hard. I noticed I had 2 sites that were related to 2 seed keywords that took 2 drastic rankings changes one with seed keyword in the domain that is 3 months old and not ranked in top 100 and the other which was targeted for same keywords not in domain about 3 years old in top 20 on average for those keywords.
I wanted to test out backlinks and content.
The new site that had the root keyword in the domain and the other was older seasoned site that had 3k in backlinks and 2 .gov. backlinks
I placed both on Yahoo Directory and optimized description,H2 and titles for both seed keywords.
Then I ran Angela's backlinks and Link wheels/pyramids to both as well as did a huge 100k xrumer link blast with majority of forum profile backlinks for 2 targeted anchor text keywords on for both evenly.
Then started drip feed pinging the backlinks.
Now the new keyword niche domain climbed to top 30 on Google in no time for both keywords. It had new content and it was not duplicated.
The older site I noticed had been dropped from page #1 on one keyword and pages 2 and 3 on others within weeks.
It was almost like it was de-indexed. This site was about 3 years old. The content was older like several months and I noticed my client was creating a couple local keyword domains like Atlanta-keyword.com behind my back using same site theme and posts.
(I found this through a plagiarism checker.) He was pretty much copying some the site and content and images from older site to the new Wordpress blog.
Question: Was it hit by the Panda update or penalized from massive backlinking? If from backlinking, did the new site get some sort of amnesty for being new having the same amount of backlinks for the same keywords? Or was it because of new content on site ?
It now seems that this older site has been placed on some sort of filter for those seed keywords it was previously ranking for so well. The newer site has climbed ranks rapidly.
Also to note, the older site did not have seed keywords in url and the newer one did.
Both are on totally different hosts and class c addresses.
Now the older site is not Sandboxed, I can pull url: and site: in Google search and everything comes up.
I even noticed that some of the pages were indexed on other keywords that were not targeted in link and anchor text blast.
My opinion Older sites 1+ years do not seem to have a big time Google Dance or lose total ranking like this.
My only theory was the old and duplicate content and a massive backlink blast created a scoring penalty for those anchor text keywords.
(Like ExtraWinner was talking about.)
My plan to get out of this.
I think the best way out of this hole would be to create some original content around those penalized keywords and add images with <alt> tags and use the same seed keywords in those as well.
Also, focus on minimal backlinks to each piece of content maybe social bookmark 10 per or so to each page created.
I think maybe do this for a couple a weeks.
Plus install a Twitter plugin to Tweet the article out and like it on a Facebook page. Reason I think social media links are starting to pull a little more weight than usual. (Not spammy type of weight but a little more authority than people think.)
Also, I am not mathematician. But, I do think that there is a metric of total search volume for a keyword and the amount of links that are indexed to it creating some sort of flag for sites that are seeing a crazy amount of backlinks that normally they usually wouldn't see for that type of keyword.
This would make sense to Extrawinners theory in general.
Now, to prove the content theory and see if I can regain rankings for my older site and see if the rankings will come back.
My newer site is actually doing great for same keywords and the linkblast did it well.
If this is correct, it seems there is a big loophole in the algorithm. You could knock out competition for while with a linkblast who have old content or outdated.
I don't think .govs and .edu sites or Wikipedia fall under same algorithm and maybe placed on a special whitelist for authority.
This is just speculation from some latest trials on some of my sites.
If anyone has suggestions on this keyword sandbox filter type of thing and how to get out of it let me know.
I think I just need to start putting out more content around those keywords that were link blasted as mentioned above for the old site to make a come back on those targeted keywords.
What you think?
