My google rankings went down

[cardif]

I've been working with a company to get some incoming links since April 2011. We are targeting only 2 keywords. For one keyword I was ranked number 1 until a couple of weeks ago. In fact, most of my rankings went down including those keywords that the company was not working on. They are writing 5 articles per month and posting them to their proprietary network. Could those backlinks could harmed my rankings?

[Theo-NL]

Pretty much anything is possible based on the data you've provided us at this moment..

• Were there any (shady) links build?
• How did the company perform for these keywords in the past?
• Were these keywords over-optimized (for example using loads of exact match anchor texts)?
• Could there have been any impact of a Panda Google update?
• Did any on-page changes take effect that might have caused these rankings to shift?

[JoeAmadon]

Yes, the links could be hurting your rankings, but as Theo points out, a number of things could be causing your rankings to drop. Have you received any notices in Google Webmaster Tools about possible unnatural linking detected? Do you handle your own SEO or have a consultant? Are you relying on the company doing linkbuilding for you to provide you with your SEO analysis? Linkbuilding can sometimes be harmful to the health of your website, so it's a good idea to have someone knowledgeable about SEO to keep an eye on the incoming links you're getting to make sure they're good quality. Or you can avoid this sort of unnatural linkbuilding altogether. Depends on the level of risk you're willing to accept.

[cardif]

Hi Joe,

I did not received any notice from Google Webmaster Tool indicating unnatural linking detected. The company is only working on proving me links. They give me every month the list of the articles they wrote and the links, that's it. How can I avoid this sort of unnatural linkbuilding?. The only thing I did today is find out what are the page and domain authority of the links they are providing me. What that company told me is that they only build links and there is nothing wrong they can do to make my rankings decrease. And what they pointed out is that my rankings went down on the keywords they were working on and also in others. Since I am not expert, I trusted them. What else I can do?

[cardif]

Hi Theo,

I am sorry I did not provided more info. This is my first time here. I answered below each question, in caps.

•    Were there any (shady) links build?
HONESTLY, I DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT DOES MEAN.

•    How did the company perform for these keywords in the past?
WHEN THE LINK BUILDER COMPANY STARTED WORKING ON 2 KEYWORDS, THEY GRADUALLY INCREASED THEIR RANKINGS WHILE THE OTHERS REMAINS WITH THE SAME RATING.  SUDDENLY, 2 WEEKS AGO ALL KEYWORDS (THE ONE THEY WERE WORKING ON AND THE OTHERS) WENT DOWN, FROM POSITION 1 TO 4.

•    Were these keywords over-optimized (for example using loads of exact match anchor texts)?.
NO, THE ARTICLES SEEM NATURAL.

•    Could there have been any impact of a Panda Google update?.
NO. THE SUDDEN DROP STARTED ON JULY 12, APROX.

•    Did any on-page changes take effect that might have caused these rankings to shift?.
I DID NOTHING ON THE PAGES. THE ONLY THING WE DID IS UPGRADE OUR SHOPPING CART RELEASE. IT WAS AROUND THAT DATE. HOWEVER, I AM ALSO ON THE SHOPPING CART FORUM AND NOBODY EXPERIMENTS ANY DROP BY UPDATING THEIR SHOPPING CART ENGINE.

thanks,

[JoeAmadon]

If it were me, I would shift the spend from linkbuilding to an SEO firm that will not only provide a good SEO audit, but is willing to provide some education as well.

I'd also focus on putting together a few really great pieces of content related to your niche. While researching for this sort of content, make note of other good sites and blogs that your site aligns with, so you can engage with them. Hopefully, through this engagement, they might find the content you've created helpful to their users/readers and link to your site. This is a pretty conservative approach that doesn't yield quick results, but I tend to be in favor of building for the long term.

There are a lot of ways you can start to generate more natural links to your site. I'd recommend doing some research on SEOmoz because my philosophy isn't the only way to go. You've got to figure out what works for your situation.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4

[cardif]

Do you know when was the last panda update?. It was feb 24 2011?

[JoeAmadon]

Movement from position 1 to position 4 is not that unusual. I imagine this has caused a subastatntial drop in traffic as the CTR tends to drop sharply after position 3, but I wouldn't consider this a dramatic drop in rankings caused by problems with your backlinks. It is possible that some backlinks might be devalued by Google which has caused a small drop,

More likely this is caused by a Panda update. Panda wasn't a one time update, and this Search Engine Watch article suggests an update around the time of your drop (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2080631/Google-Quietly-Launches-Panda-Update-Version-2.2). This probably means that Google sees your content as a little weaker than your competitors.

Based on this, I don't think you need to make any major changes. Try to get some more good content up on your site. And I'm not sure how active you are in the social realm, but more social engagement (I suspect Google is a big fan of +1's) could help.

I'm not sure if your on-page efforts are also limited to two keywords, but if so, I'd consider expanding that a bit. Diversification will make your traffic and revenue less susceptible to fluxuations like this. Moving into the social media will also give you another way to produce traffic that isn't reliant on SEO, while usually increasing the efforts of your SEO.