1 page drop - what do you do?
spunko2010
Isle of Man
in Need Help
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
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.
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.
Like this for example.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Btw, what are SAPE links? No idea haha.
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!
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