My Google rankings just dropped????

**CS_Laura** · 02-23-2007, 05:19 AM

Can anyone help out here. I've been optimizing my website through content, reciprical links, and one way linking, and was having a lot of success. I was ranked in the 10-19 range on several of my keywords. Then this morning I wnet from 10-19 to the 100-200 range.........

Does anyone have any ideas? My only thought is that recently I have started blogging (within past month) and have been adding comments on other blog sites. As a result of leaving comments on some other larger blog sites my inlinks have increased from 400 to about 1,100 in about one month (by checking linkdomain: on yahoo). It appears that three of these blog sites are adding a link to my site with each new blog which is increaseing my inlinks quickly. These sites have a pr4-pr6 and I have not linked back to them, but could this be why my rankings have dropped?

Any ideas or advice would be greatly appreciated.

**HHI Golf Guy** · 02-23-2007, 11:00 AM

Google has made at least one filter change to its algorithm over the past week. (A filter is kind of like a ranking sub-routine within the algorithm).

What exactly did they change? I don't know, I haven't studied it. All of our sites eaither maintained or improved their rankings.

From your post, it certainly sounds like you spammed yourself with links from your blog. That's a common mistake that people make with blogging. They think that every time they make a post that they need to include a link.

The truth is that the content of the blog, combined with a few key links to your site, is what helps your site. What you want to do is have the overall theme of the blog support the theme of your main site.

Blog spam can kill a site. I have seen it happen before. My suggestion is to remove a ton of those blog links, then submit a reinclusion request to Google. Let them know what you did and how you resolved the issue.

Again, that may not even be the problem. I have not examined your site. I'm relying on what you posted and what I have seen happen to other sites in the past.

**CS_Laura** · 02-23-2007, 11:16 AM

Thanks a ton for the information. My frustration is in the fact that I really haven't posted too many replies to blogs with links to my site. But what I noticed happened was that two of the blog websites had my profile (which had a link to my website) on the front page as a "recently viewed" or something to that effect and everytime a new blog from someone else was posted, I was getting an inlink from these two sites. As a result I received probably about 500 inlinks from only these two sites in about three weeks. All this occured without me knowing about it......

So, I'm guessing google didn't like all the inlinks from two sites occuring so quickly and as a result my drop in rankings.

It's very frustrating, my site is only about 5-6 months old and I was working very hard (about 2 hours/day 6 days a week)on SEO and doing very well overall on my keywords, now it feels like all that work was just a waste.

You had mentioned that I can remove these blog links then resubmit to google. How do I go about removing the links after they already exists?

Thanks for the help.

**Alpharetta** · 02-23-2007, 11:19 AM

Before you go crazy about blog links, many carry the nofollow on the comments so Google knows to not add weight to the link. You can check if a link to your site has a nofollow on it by simply going to the page where you see the link to your site and right clicking your mouse. From their click "view source" read through the code and find your link. If it says nofollow, there is no weight added to the link so it may not be that.

**CS_Laura** · 02-23-2007, 11:32 AM

Thanks, the "view source" is a great tool. I just checked and it appears that there were no "nofollow" commands for my links from the two websites that created the approx 500 inlinks to my site.

**HHI Golf Guy** · 02-23-2007, 12:03 PM

Originally Posted by Alpharetta

Before you go crazy about blog links, many carry the nofollow on the comments so Google knows to not add weight to the link.

You're absolutely correct. I was interpreting it that she had posted links from her own blog. I have seen blog owners try and post thousands of links from their blog to their primary domain, sometimes with bad results. My mistake.

**Cash Home Buyers _ com** · 02-23-2007, 11:52 PM

I would not worry about the links in this case. It is difficult to permanently damage a site only by "bad" links or "fast" links. Most people are overly paranoid about this and it is not something to worry about, the filters that punish sites for bad or fast links are very forgiving and are really only looking for the spam sites. It is possible that you were kicked down a few notches for these links, but it is most likely a temporary issue. Your site is new so it is more likely to fluctuate and be less stable as your "seo foundation" has not had much time to settle. Over time these links that were obtained "too quickly" will actually benefit your site more and more.

So continue on building links and working on it, knowing that progress is not always a straight line and is going to be more unpredictable because of the newness of your site.

my 2 cents

Scott

**HHI Golf Guy** · 02-24-2007, 12:48 AM

Originally Posted by Cash Home Buyers _ com

It is difficult to permanently damage a site only by "bad" links or "fast" links.

That's simply not true. Over the past year both Yahoo and Google have been attempting to place greater emphasis on the quality of links and apply it to their algorithms.

There was even a period of time when you could point thousands of spammy links at a site and get it to crash their Google rankings. I was able to accomplish this one more than one occasion.

Google has also been adjusting their "link bombing" filter over the past month or so. Remember when you could type in "miserable failure" and the first two results were the WhiteHouse.gov site and Michael Moore site. Not so today.

Simply put, links can have both a positive and negative effect on a web site. Links that helped boost your web site SERP's today may contain little or no value tomorrow.

**Nu-Home-Source-Realty** · 02-24-2007, 08:40 AM

personally i love what google has done, i have two brand new sites in the top ten. I have amy fort worth site at 7 for fort worth tx real estate, and my 1 month old denton site on the first page for many keywords.

**Cash Home Buyers _ com** · 02-24-2007, 11:33 AM

Originally Posted by HHI Golf Guy

That's simply not true. Over the past year both Yahoo and Google have been attempting to place greater emphasis on the quality of links and apply it to their algorithms.

There was even a period of time when you could point thousands of spammy links at a site and get it to crash their Google rankings. I was able to accomplish this one more than one occasion.

Google has also been adjusting their "link bombing" filter over the past month or so. Remember when you could type in "miserable failure" and the first two results were the WhiteHouse.gov site and Michael Moore site. Not so today.

Simply put, links can have both a positive and negative effect on a web site. Links that helped boost your web site SERP's today may contain little or no value tomorrow.

Everything you said I can agree with, but it has nothing to do with the validity of my statement. 500 links from blogs are not going to "permanently" damage a site. Like you said,

There was even a period of time when you could point thousands of spammy links at a site and get it to crash their Google rankings

Reread what I wrote.

thanks
Scott