Can a BOTW Listing Cause Major Google Juggle?

[Shakakka]

Hi all,

I've got 2 websites that are both pretty much the same size and design, and both in the same niche but with 100% unique content on each.

They've been doing well traffic-wise, and they've been making me good money. Last week I took advantage of the Best of the Web birthday sale, and ate the $600 to get both sites listed.

Sites were accepted immediately and crawled on BOTW right away. The very next day my traffic on each of these sites took a dramatic drop, and for the past 4 days the traffic is literally 1/10th of what it was before. Keep in mind that these sites are over a year old.

I've built NO other links to these sites for several months now, with the exception of maybe a half-dozen Yahoo Answers links to each.

So my question of course is this: did the BOTW listing cause some kind of google sandbox affect? Could this one new link be so powerful that it sandboxed my websites, even temporarily, to such a huge degree?

I understand a website will jump in rankings from time to time, especially if you build a lot of links at once, and I'm also pretty sure these sites will return to page 1 for many of my search terms. But this is something very weird, something I've never seen before, and I guess I'm putting this out there as a word of warning (because if I could go back I'd probably not have listed the sites at all, or at least done them one at a time).

Anyone else see this type of thing happen to them? Or can anyone offer some type of alternative explanation?

[bonk12]

There is definitely an alternate explanation for the reason that your two sites are receiving a fraction of the traffic that they should be.

I would suggest to start build more backlinks. You mentioned that the sites are about a year old, so backlinks that you used to have could have potentially been deleted or just outdated.

This whole thing could be an unfortunate consequence.

Anyway, hope that helps

Cheers,

Steven Patterson

[Shakakka]

Thanks for the response. I find it almost impossible to believe however, that my rankings would drop so instantly and dramatically for BOTH websites the exact same day they got listed on BOTW.

I will of course, continue to build more links.

[Dresden14]

$600??? I put 2 sites in botw with the april sale too, was $149/ea with a 25% discount....

[Althaf Ahmed]

I find it hard to believe both are connected. BOTW link used to be powerful a couple years. Not anymore really, because end of the day it is simply a directory, plus the links are paid.

I think you should start a steady link building campaign across your sites and monitor the difference in traffic.

[Shakakka]

$600??? I put 2 sites in botw with the april sale too, was $149/ea with a 25% discount....

Yes, but these were permanent listings. The $149 price only gets you listed for one year.

I obviously need to continue building links, and I will. It's tough when you have 40 different websites though, with more in the making.

[Dresden14]

Oh, yeah mines annual. I do rank # 2 now, so im sure it may have helped :-) When it comes back up, ill do the full price deal.

[sirkaliber]

Hey, any update on this?

[Shakakka]

Update: My rankings have NOT improved. In fact, they're miserable.

Check the graphs below. They show my traffic for both websites, from Feb 1st until today. You can see that on or about May 1st, both sites received a DRAMATIC (and apparently permanent) drop in traffic.

They were both added to BOTW that same day.

Conclusion: I'm never going to be using BOTW again. Google seems to hate it.

[Ernie Lonardo]

You sure it wasnt just googles algo changes? I doubt adding a link to a directory would be the cause of you losing 300-400% traffic...

[Shakakka]

Look at the graph. My sites were doing fine after the algo changes, and were steadily gaining ground.

As much as everyone says "It can't be that one link", there comes a time when you have to look at this from a logical standpoint and say it MUST be.

This was the only change made to these two sites, made on the same day, and the change affected the sites both in identical dramatic ways.

[sirkaliber]

Since you were doing fine after the algo, I really think it's just the effect of a really powerful link coming into your sites(I'm willing to bet the most powerful you've had so far). Yahoo directory can have the same effect and I seriously doubt Google would look down on either directory backlink. Things should be looking up soon!

In the meantime I would keep on building links.

[Shakakka]

That's good advice, and yes, it probably is my most powerful link. Time to build more links. . . (isn't it always that time though?)

Anyone got any reasonable ideas on how long Google wants to dance with me? Seems unfair, because they didn't even ask me to dance.