Question about ranking and links

[activitysuper]

Hi,

Some back ground info first: My DA/PA is 42, the competitors who show up in the search engines for the term I am after have DA/PA 55/60.

I have been creating anchor text links which target the term im after through guest blogging usually blogs with DA/PA 40+, I did this consistently with a guest post every 3 days for about a month so that's around 10 guest posts.

And I also did some brand name blog comments, but these were no-follow and added sig to some forums.

This moved me from page 5 to page 1, position 4.

I then stopped and over the last 3 weeks it slipped to position 6 then to position 8.

The competition doesn't look to actively target this term looking at the data from opensite explorer there main anchor text is there brand names.

Why would I be slipping through the results? Not moaning just want to understand why so I can counter it.

I was thinking about going for social signals through a blog to help.

[Audiohype]

I would say there's a couple of factors to consider here:

1. Are all of your guest posts still there / links still in place? Sometimes for whatever reasons these can disappear.

2. Where have you been posting? If you have posts on suspect sites you may find that these can be hit with a penalty / devalued and your links become less valuable.

3. Have your posts been moved from front page to lower pages on the site? If the full post was being displayed on the front page and then became relegated to a subpage this may affect the weight it passes.

4. Did you vary the anchor text? Especially with the penguin update, you need to be varying up your anchor text. If all of a sudden you are getting lots of exact match keywords that don't look natural this may have triggered alarm bells with Google.

Social signals are likely to help with the posts strength, you should be aiming to promote your content on social networks anyway as part of your SEO efforts.

Hope that helps.

[activitysuper]

Cheers.

1. Checked guest posts and all links are still active and do-follow.

2. Usually the blogs have DA/PA 40+ some have DA/PA 60/80 but I don't know if they have been hit by pen.

3. Yes they do move down and then off the homepage.

4. All 10 have same anchor text, so this may be it.

Looks like it could be #3 maybe even #4 but then I would expect to drop like a fly instead of a slow decline.

I imagine drop 1 was guest posts falling off homepage and drop 2 was even more posts falling off homepage.

[Audiohype]

Sounds like that may be part of the issue but I wouldn't expect such high fluctutions. Keep on creating good content, share it and promote it, and keep away from using really anchor intensive keywords.

Best of luck!