Aggressive Loss in Rankings

[mj775]

I recently launched a website and used local directories, web directories and guest blogging as a means of getting links to the site. Within 60 days the site was ranking on the first page for a highly competitive keyword. It was hovering on the first page for about two weeks before it plummeted in ranking to near 200. I am not finding any crawl errors or duplicate content issues on the site. Could my links have caused this massive decrease in rankings?

[RankSurge]

Was the site a never before registered domain? Or was it already well in existence prior? If it's the latter, it might have had a history that was passed along to you.

The other thing to consider is that if you are entering a competitive space, your competition might have stepped up their game too...

[mj775]

The domain has never had a site on it. I agree that in a competitive space there will be movement but this is drastic. The site went from the first page to close to 200. That signals to me there is something wrong. Any ideas? Could it be some of the links that were built (i.e. web directories)? The site does show up for the www and non www version and I just signified to Google the preferred domain in WMT,

[LoveFitness]

Hi,

I think the biggest indicator is to look at the types of links you were building. What was the quality of these directory sites and the blogs that you were posting on?

Over the last couple of weeks Google has been penalising sites that considers having gotten links from blog networks. You may have been affected by this. Also have you been blogging on your own blog? Have you actively created fresh content for your blog that others would like to link to themselves.

Havre you also been focusing on your brand name when link building? As just focusing on a competitive keyword shows clear signs to Google you are over optimising.

Try and build a more natural linking strategy and also ensure you are updating the content on your own blog.

I hope this helps,

Ally

[mj775]

This definitely help. We have been varying the anchor text on our links to show a more natural backlink profile but definitely focused a lot of the links on our target keyword (which is also the name of the site/domain). Have you seen/heard anyone be able to quickly get their rankings back if they are able to build a more natural link profile?

[LoveFitness]

It depends on a few factors. I would initially start and look at your competitors backlink profiles (in your case whoever hasn't lost their rankings and is still on the first page) and see if there are oppurtunities for you to try and get a link. I would look at the sites that you are trying guest post on as well and check their link profile to ensure there is nothing odd there.

Also ensure you are creating fresh content on your site and blog so people will naturally link to you.

Thanks,

Ally

[mj775]

Thanks Ally. This is the route I have been taking but may have been over aggressive in the use and anchor text on directories. It seems there are a lot of people that just got hit by Google.

[LoveFitness]

No problem, good luck with your link building and rankings.

Ally