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1 page drop - what do you do?

spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
Just wanted to get some ideas on what to do when this happens. When 1 page drops suddenly from page 1 to page 15 (but other pages aren't affected), do you continue building links or stop? I'm not sure what Google's theory on it is, I've read that they're trying to see if the link velocity continues even if they drop the page down 10 pages, but does that mean a 'natural' link loss would then occur and if it doesn't then Google is suspicious.... Or does it mean that my page can continue generating links even with a tanking ranking so it must be 'legit' ?


Comments

  • What did you do that made it drop to P15?
  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    edited May 2014
    Well I've seen it twice on 2 different sites over the past few days, but not for all pages. I didn't do anything different, just kept building links with SER.

    I bought some SAPE links a few weeks ago for another site, the rankings dropped to page 3 but then bounced back a few days later to position 1.. and still there. Never saw it drop to page 15 though.
  • 2Take22Take2 UK
    edited May 2014
    Sometimes a drop like that would indicate that you've tripped some kind of filter, or it could just be google recalculating the SERP (and the links you've been building) and putting you there for a short while until it figures out where you actually belong. I normally see this when tiering heavily at high velocity, with some keywords disappearing from the top 300 altogether for a couple of days.

    It could also be due to link loss, but that's probably unlikely if you've not stopped building links.

    Either way, for the time being I'd just keep building links and see what happens, and if it's still there after a couple of weeks then it's most likely a filter.
  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    Thanks @2Take2.. Can I ask what you mean by 'filter' ?
  • A spam filter.

     Like this for example.


  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    Ah, ok. As long as it's not manual, I don't mind. :) Thanks
  • Tim89Tim89 www.expressindexer.solutions
    edited May 2014
    You need to make the decision and find out if you want to go ahead with that page or simply re-create that page and redirect your old page to your new page, don't take ages doing this, just do it.

    drops like those are quite easy to determine if it's a penalty or if it's link loss, well, relatively easy if you keep track of your backlinks.

    How long was the page ranking before you witnessed the drop? If it was ranking for around 3 months + and you were not currently backlinking that page anymore, I'd sway more toward the assumption that it was link loss, remember that all of your hard work link building could vanish over night if those particular back links die or get moderated or fall off a page, this is an important factor to think about when a sudden drop occurs in any page and people automatically think it's a penalty and they move on and ditch the domain for someone to quickly snap up and turn it back into a success or part of their PBN.

    Then there are dances, but dances generally happen whilst you're link building and indexing rapidly, rankings bounce crazy amounts, but settle down after 4 - 6 weeks, again, this is whilst you are actively link building so you should know if the page is suffering from this.

    The only times I've seen page drops happen is when the serp introduces a new update/major algo change/flushes their index, which then reshuffles their index and it's a knock on effect from there.

    I giggle sometimes when people state they are penalised when they suffer from a -20 drop or -50 drop... it's how you are link building that is effecting your rank fluctuations, not penalties, everyone has their link building methods, if you are continuously suffering from massive drops and ranking fluctuations then obviously you need to swap out your strategy, the people that rank, over and over again are the people doing it right, who do not complain about updates and penalties/being hit etc etc.

    People need to start thinking differently and stop thinking "is this penalised" but instead think of these "filters" or "serp land mines" as obstacles' to avoid..

    Reading up on patents.. well, that information should be taken lightly, anyone can patent anything they want, does not mean they use it to 100% as documented, which would mean, all we'd have to do is read every single patent which would in theory be a serp seo user manual, these patents only complicate things, all you really need to do is have an understanding of how search engines technically work, what functions can be used in conjuction with search queires, how things are corralated within a mysql query, I suggest everyone read up on a little php (easies language to pick up) and then simply create a simple search engine yourselves so you can roughly have an idea of what is possible, this will give you a much better picture of how search works, the rest is just configuration and as @2take2 said, 'filters'..

    if anchor% = blah blah do -50
    if anchortext = blah blah do -25
    if backlinkcount = blah blah do ....
    if backlinkcountincreaseperday = blah blah do...

    not a very good example if you're a dev but this example is meant for the non-coding type brain, but understand how search would work in theory, will make you look at things differently.

    It's just a search engine for christ sake, there's only so much automation and functionality they can introduce to it, various mathmatical algos that analyse backlink statistics and anchor text variations, all that good stuff, but it's all man made and can only be modified to a certain point as to what is mathmatically possible, therefore they'll always be a strategy that will work.

    Anyway, I should get back to work doing nothing and watch some netflix.
  • Can you more specifically describe what happened? Were you building links at a consistent velocity? Does your site have any authoritative links at all? 
  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    Ah, just checked my email account linked to my old Webmaster tools account (I always delete the site from it), got an Unnatural link warning 2 weeks ago, looks like that's what's hit. Shame! Onto the next...
  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    edited May 2014
    Here's the full text / warning for anyone interested:


    Unnatural links to your site—impacts links

    Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. Learn more.


    Now, the good news is I pretty much know the page affected as it's tanked. The bad news is it might trigger a wider investigation of my entire site if I go supergrass :D  I've been spamming over 100 links a day to this 1 page, for 18 months.... Lol.
  • Tim89Tim89 www.expressindexer.solutions
    edited May 2014
    Well the good news and what they've so helpfully stated, is that they haven't penalised your site/page directly, they have only targeted the links pointing to that page/site.

    Your site should be good to go still.

    Besides, 100 links a day for 18 months is around 50k links, when you factor in actual index rates and link loss, that isn't so many.
  • Well said Tim (again).

    Spunko, I have a site that's been hit for 7 months. I deliberately wanted it penalised and got it. I have been unpicking each type/platform of link slowly (this takes forever). The examples G gave me have been blog comments, shitty article directories and forum profiles. (Senuke links basically). Obviously Senuke's database of parked domains (money spinner mo-fos...they park their in-built list of domains after 6-12 months collecting everyone's links and traffic in the process). Anyway, the article directories are probs from badly spun articles (used the same ones over and over), forum profiles and 100% anchor comments are obvious. The site is still dead, for now, but I'm just unpicking and seeing if there's a certain type of link that G doesn't like. 

    With your site, I suppose there are a few options: delete the page (could trigger the full site audit as you suggested), redirect the page (again, audit) or both could get you out of the shit quickly, or you could use a variety of tools SEOprofiler/Linkquidator and Disavow links that are bad, but this could make it shit for everyone. Let us know what you do.
  • 2Take22Take2 UK
    edited May 2014
    As above, your entire site hasn't been manually slapped, but good luck getting it to rank for those keywords again without some serious link removal (and waiting around), which would essentially see you starting from zero anyway.

    There's more to this notice than 'we have only taken action against certain spammy inbound links', and in typical google style, it's very ambiguous, and comes with a nice big dollop of FUD (and normally a penguin penalty) to boot.

    Your best bet is to just kill the page, as the penalty/action will be also be affecting any other inbound links that are using the same anchor text or stems of it, so as I said, even if you get rid of all of the spammy links, you would be still getting zero value from any decent links that fit the same criteria, and would most likely need to wait for the next penguin update/refresh to see any results anyway.

    Total waste of time IMO.

    In your shoes I'd swap the content on the page, send a few hunderd links to it to get it recrawled, kill the page dead, and build it again on a different url (with the old content if you like).

    Others would probably do things differently though.


  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    edited May 2014
    Thanks for all the feedback @Tim89, @2Take2 and @JudderMan

    What I'm going to do is, do nothing. I've been vocal about not using disavow etc to others and I'm not about to let Google know a little more information about my links. I think that people overlook the damage that it potentially can do - you're basically confirming to Google that you may have engaged in dodgy practices, that their manual review is at least fairly accurate, and that you are aware of what disavowing/nofollow does, etc etc. And then run the risk of triggering further actions on this site. I want Google to think I'm a total thicko webmaster who, as far as they are aware, hasn't even bothered reading their notice in WMT and certainly doesn't understand it if they did.  I want the manual team to move on to other sites and forget about mine, so they presume that's what I've done about their notice.

    What I will do is keep building links to this page at the same-ish rate i've been doing. I know it probably won't rank again (currently page 8 so there is an increase of sorts) but I've got 2 other sites on the 1st page anyway for this KW. I'll report back if it does anything.

    To me their email sounds like a fishing expedition. We think you might be generating links yourself but we aren't sure, so confirm/deny it for us by doing all the legwork and let us throttle your page in the mean time anyway.
  • This penalty malarky still smells fishy (continuing your fishing expedition theme...) as it just makes me think why bother link-building to your own site, why not just kill all of your competitors?
  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    @JudderMan I wondered that, but since it's just a 1-page penalty (out of 1000+) then it'd be counter-productive to try to hammer your competitor's in this way. Plus it took Google 18 months to notice.
  • edited May 2014
    Fairynuff :) 

    Might be a stupid question but 100 links a day for 18 months....are you using the same spun content for T1? 
  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    @JudderMan I varied it once about a year ago and is always highly spun. It could be a reason though, I'll make sure to re-generate new text this week for older projects. Overlooked that, thanks
  • I go through all projects once every 2-3 months and delete the content, adding more into my Dropbox where SER pulls the articles/titles from. 

    Maybe do some handwritten articles and press releases pointing to the page.
  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    Just to update, now back on page 1 after doing nothing but continuing link building. Will update here if it disappears again.
  • Very interesting to read through this @spunko2010
    My site has just moved around over the last 24 hours in the ranks, it did this before and I stupidly made a new domain, only to find this one ranking.
    If you had been slapped it would of disappeared from everywhere, but just keep going and keep building (it seems to work)
  • @spunko2010 Nice thread and happy to see you ranking back.

    Few questions, are you just building contextuals on Tier 1 or other properties too? Which ones if I may ask? I can hardly make 300 contextuals per any project in lifetime, let alone 100 daily.

    Would be great to know. :)

    Thanks.
  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    edited May 2014
    @Pratik

    For SER T1 I am doing Sn, SB, SerEngines, Articles, mainly. But I also throw in a few PBN links for my top performing pages.  I don't know why you're struggling to get 100 verifieds a day, are you updating the email address? I use 10-20 and delete them after 1-2 months with new oens.

    For T2 I use pretty much everything.

    I also use SAPE Links on some of the more difficult pages, but these never seem to rank in top 3 now.
  • edited May 2014
    @spunko2010 I also replace emails monthly or so. But I guess you are allowing SER to post multiple times on sites too? If yes, how many? Otherwise for me, I can't exceed more than 300-500 contextuals (unique domains) sadly for lifetime.

    Btw, what are SAPE links? No idea haha.
  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    No I don't allow multiple times, well not under the same account. I find that SER finds new targets - I rarely use lists for my T1s but do add new targets manually. Do you use lists?
  • By using list, are you asking I buy list or scrape my own or do you mean using global site lists like verifieds/submitted and such? If so, yes, I do use global site lists.

    I kinda find it hard for SER to find unique domain daily. Contextuals are just a bit of problems to find, the junk is pretty good - for the first time, I've been getting over 100+ LPM running 10 projects through scheduler. :)
  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    edited May 2014
    I don't really bother with filters as much as I used to. For example the difference between PR1 and PR3 is obviously high but I use other services for high PR links. SER is best used, in my opinion, for building crap links fast. I would never rely on it for high quality links only, but that's just me.

    Sape is a private link network from Russia, you pay monthly to embed 'high quality' links on blogs etc:

    http://searchengineland.com/did-google-just-penalize-another-link-network-sape-links-150843

    it was slapped by Google last year so they may slap it again but it's working really well for me right now. Just a shame it's so expensive.  I have to say, if you've never tried a PBN (I was initially dubious) then give it a shot, if you find a decent service it can give better rankings than SER, in my experience. Although of course it's more expensive. A mixture of the 2 is the name of the game!
  • Spunko, initially when I started, I didn't used to rely much on filters maybe that's why I ranked. These days, it has got much harder to rank than the early days.

    I was definitely interested to try some PBNs at a point, definitely will look into it at some point. And yes, you can't really compare both, SER is good for making links quick whereas a significant boost comes from PR. Saw many case studies too where just 3-4 PBNs changes the game, even without needing any tiers built to it.

    Btw, is it sape.ru or something else? I googled and can see so many wannabes on the SERPs, lol.

    Thanks. :)
  • spunko2010spunko2010 Isle of Man
    edited May 2014
    Sape.ru is the actual site but you need to speak Russian to be able to use it. Google translate doesn't work well. I find it better to buy services on other forums from Bulgarian/E European users who know Russian and are selling their services with good ratings and reviews. Of course you pay slightly more this way, but they can select filters for you, build T2s etc. Imagine trying to use SER if it was written in Cyrillic 3:-O

    It's not risk-free but what is....? I'm only using it on 1 of my sites for now. BHW has a few good sellers of this, but seriously caveat emptor etc


  • Yep, the language definitely looks messed up haha. Much appreciated for the guidance. :)
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