Help : Phrase based penalty

[dizen]

Guys,

I added 200 backlinks to my site within one day with anchor text "free credit report" , my site was #39 for that term.

2 days later my site is deep down burried under tons of other sites for that term. Any chances that my site will regain its previous position for this term?

Is this only a temporary effect?. My site is not in sandbox. I can find it using site: and info: plus the site still ranks for other terms that don't contain term "credit report"

Update: It has been 12 days and my pages are still deep down buried. How to get out of this situation fast?

Thanks

[dburk]

Hi dizen,

As long as your backlinks are not spam and they are from pages with related content you won't run any risk of a penalty.

Many people will attempt to build large numbers of links that are totally spam. I think many folks believe all backlinks are the same and that everyone else spams so why shouldn't they. That is wrong thinking and frequently leads to having all their backlinks devalued by the search engine's anti spamdexing teams.

I'm not making a judgement on your backlinks, I haven't seen them, but 200 backlinks in a single day, without considerable and sustained promotional effort, fits a pattern that may look like spamming.

So how do you improve your situation? Go and get 200 more backlinks today, tomorrow, the next day and so on. Just make sure that you aren't spamming, get quality backlinks and your search engine position will no longer be critical.

A quality backlink is a link that serves the interests of the visitors of the page that contains the outbound link. If the link doesn't fit the needs and interest of the page's visitors then it is probably seen as spam by those visitors, the site owner, as well as any anti spamdexing team member checking up on them.

[Zach Booker]

200 links in one day isn't enough to warrant Google's attention - atleast IMO.

I think i'd be far more likely that going after such a competitive term as "free credit report" would result in people simply doing more work then you and outranking you that way.

As Don said just keep on doing your thing, you'll shoot back up in a bit.

Zach

EDIT: Not sure why I put Nathan when his name is Don, whoops!

[crispin]

You might try running a search for:

free credit report -jhuwhfwjebyfe

this changes the search term, but should give you the same results. I have a site which
jumps from #49 to #4 when I add the -garbage bit.

This implies to me that there is a keyphase specific problem, possibly for just one page on my site.

You can also do an allinanchor:free credit reports to see if you get a boost as well.

As to what you do...?

Adding a few non keyphrase links to that page seemed to help a little, although that could have been just time.

I really don't know how to sort it. I'd like to know as well.

Crispin

[dburk]

Hi Crispin,

I believe I understand the point you intended to make, by adding gobbledygook to your search term it should return the same result set. That is not how Google's search queries work. Even though it's a nonsensical term it changes the nature of the query in a significant way.

It is a different query and should return a different result set given sufficient options. There are many factors that effect a search result set and even a very small change alters the results returned. Computer programs follow logic and aren't sophisticated enough to discriminate such abstract relationships, therefore your argument does not hold merit in my opinion.