Oh, how I wish that this had never happened to me - my money site has fallen out of the Google search landscape for its best keywords. I went from making $20 with this site on Friday to making $3 on Sunday. My traffic also had a similarly stark decline. The world is ending, all is lost, it is time to pack it up and go home.
Haha! Not!
Sure, I am a bummed big time by this set back, but I cannot let it get me down for long. There is just too much to do.
I’m still not entirely sure what it is that I did wrong to make the Google gods smack my site down, but they sure did. My site did not get de-indexed, it just dissappeared from all the awesome terms that were sending people to my site. This could all just be the Google shuffle, but it has been 3 days now since my site has been showing up for the terms that I was ranking well for before the smack down. I’ve never had a site do this for so long so I am getting a little nervous about it.
Here are some recent changes that I made to my site that may have gotten me in some trouble with the big G:
- I have been sending well optimized links to an interior page of my post in an effort to rank better for a term. I was sitting somewhere on page two and decided that I wanted to see what it would take to get pushed onto page one. So I started sending it one link a day from some “article directories” that I have access to. I wrote perfectly legit posts in on these directories with an good anchor back to my site. I varied the anchor text with every one of these links and didn’t even always point the link to the interior page that I was trying to rank, but I did send 10 links to my site in 10 days. It is possible that this is what got me in trouble. Maybe I sent too many links too quickly to my site.
- I changed the meta description of the blog to read better to a person. Before I have used one of my site’s keywords way too much and it actually made it a little unreadable. I thought that it would be better for people who actually read those things if I removed the unnecessary repetition and let more the description appear in the SERPs listing. I’ve never heard of this type of thing happening before, but it sure would suck if it did. Ishould probably change it back to see if it changes anything.
- I updated to the latest version of Wordpress. If this is what affected my SERP rankings I am going to jump off of a bridge.
I am pretty certain that I just got too carried away with linking to my site using the “Article Directories” I have access to. The only other explanation is that the SERPs are jumping up and down for these terms and it will work itself out over time. I don’t think that later is true since many of the other sites don’t seem to be jumping up and down very much!
I honestly don’t have much of a clue as to what to do to get back in good graces with Google. So I am planning on adding a lot of new content to the blog, maybe one post a day for as long as it takes, and getting some solid single backlinks to the site. I hope this gets me out soon and in an even stronger position than before, but I just don’t know. Only time and hard will tell.
4 Comments
I seriously doubt that it was anything that you did directly. I know the directories that you’ve been sending links from they are just too new for google to be even noticing your links yet. I have seen a pattern though with some of my hubpages ie authority site and I believe the pattern is very niche dependent. Google ranks the page - sometimes in an hour or a month - I stay there for a few days - I drop down to say 250, a week/month later I am back, then I drop - this time to maybe 100, this happens 3/5 times - each time the drop is less. Finally I stay on the front page. This has happened to me for hubs I never built any links to! It seems the natural thing for google -to test the waters with your sites a few times.
For non-competitive niches I will stay up on the first page - probably because G is scratching for pages to answer the query - but for anything else I don’t stablise for a month/year - and again I think this is entirely niche dependent
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Sounds a bit like the Google sandbox to me. Not something I’ve experienced personally, but have been reading a bit about it lately. Griz and Court are always talking about it.
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Steward Reply:
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:30 am
Hi Rod,
It doesn’t seem like the sandbox to me. Looking back on it a little over two months later this has been happening to my site every so often. It keeps ranking better and better the more content I put up on it but then all of a sudden it drops from the SERPs to appear just a few days later. It is really bizarre, but there isn’t much I seem to be able to do about it other than just write more content and get more links.
Steward
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Rod from Tri Nations Rugby Reply:
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Steward, how’s your ranking now? Has it recovered?
Since commenting last time, my site did exactly the same thing - first time I’ve ever experienced this. I was still getting some long-tail traffic from Google, but lost my main keyword rankings. Thankfully a few weeks later they reappeared and are almost back to where they were. I’m hoping that’s it now, but reading Lissie’s comment above makes me wonder a bit…!
The same thing has also happened to another of my sites, and I’m still waiting for it to bounce back.
Personally, I think it’s because both these sites are still fairly new - that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it anyway! I don’t know if the same thing goes for yours or not, but I can’t imagine any of the factors you mentioned above having much of an impact, certainly not 10 links in 10 days anyway!
Rod
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Steward Reply:
September 2nd, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Rod,
Right now it is back to ranking for all its terms, but just a few days ago it was in another little SERP disappearing act. For about 6 days it was nowhere to be found for the terms that had been getting it the most traffic and then all of a sudden it appeared popped back up. This is probably the 5th time something like this has happened since June.
The site is well over a year old and has around 1500 links according to yahoo (though a lot of these are probably from crappy articles directories).
My guestimate is that I don’t have enough authority links for the site to solidify its rankings or I don’t have enough content. I have trying to get both recently for the site since it has potential to be a good money maker and it is pretty fun to write for. Well see what ends up happening.
Steward
I do not think your linking activity caused any harm. I also went on a small linking rampage for a few of my blogs and got links added rather quickly.
The links helped my position on Google. They in no way hurt. These liks were directed at both home pages and interior pages.
I have not updated WP yet so I can’t help you there.
I also would not be too happy about making $20 one day and theb $3 the next. There is not a whole lot that can be done other than keep forging ahead…
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Steward Reply:
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:28 am
Hi Potato Chef,
For the encouragement to keep on keeping on!
Steward
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How rich is the content of your site?
When it comes to thin-content affiliate sites Google can be pretty vicious when it comes to de-SERPing.
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Steward Reply:
September 2nd, 2009 at 9:17 am
Hi Jade, the content on the site is very rich and very useful information. There are some affiliate links, but this is almost nothing in comparison with the vast amount of content that I have on the site. As of right now, there at around 5800 words of content on the site and over 300 pages index by Google. It is a PR 3 website and gets a fair amount of traffic when it hasn’t disappeared from the search engines.
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