Help! From 7th Google to 500th OVERNIGHT?! WTF!?!

[RUSHYYZ]

I'm in shock, my website was ranked 7th position Google valid daily and checked for 3 weeks straight, then I fired my SEO guy, and I checked ranking 2 days later and literally overnight, it comepletely dropped out of top 500 for my key word "beer gut"!!!! I am so upset!

beerandbody (d o t) c o m

Could he have sabotaged my site somehow?! I have heard that the infamous" google sandbox" is just a myth? Is this real and what do I do to fix this undeserving dilemma? Can I contact Google for explanation?

PLEASE, SEO experts tell me what to do....we worked so hard to get first page, is there a way of checking my status with Google and appealing?

The real question is, what is my fired SEO expert somehow spammed millions of low-quality links automatically, would that have caused the rapid overnight descent. And if so, WHAT WOULD PREVENT A COMPETITOR FROM DOING THE SAME THING TO DESTROY THEIR COMPETITION?!?

[Martin Fronek]

Never fire a SEO guy :-)

Kidding aside, unless he still had access to your website, he couldn't do much. My guess is he just pulled the backlinks he could pull (and if he was buying or swapping links, he could've pulled a lot of them, including all the key ones).

He nor your competition can hurt your SERP, that's Google's philosophy.

[Andyhenry]

Sounds simple - he probably did what I do - build lots of links on properties which he controls.

When you stopped paying - he took down a bunch of links.

[YasirYar]

Nothing to worry about, just get good quality links pointing to your website and the rankings will shoot right back up.

[YasirYar]

Haha the problem might be because you fired your SEO guy.. who probably deleted a lot of links he built for you.

[ShayRockhold]

Originally Posted by RUSHYYZ

I'm in shock, my website was ranked 7th position Google valid daily and checked for 3 weeks straight, then I fired my SEO guy

....so.....he did his job, and apparently did it well.

Why did you fire him? Just curious.

[BenSalez]

More than likely he either killed some of your high PR backlinks or it is just google reshuffling its rankings. I have found that in the first year or two of a sites life (unless it has very strong PR), it will fallout or get de-indexed at least 1-3 times. If this is the case it is perfectly normal and should return even stronger.

And to answer your question about your former SEO-guy spamming you with a scrapebox or xrumer blast... if this is the case it could certainly affect rank; however your website will return stronger when it comes back.

Ben

[sandrax]

Hire him again, apparently he did something right, this is too much of a coincidence ...

Yeah, why did you fire him in the first place??

[JustFelix]

Does he do a lot of backlinks to help you in serp? He could of taken all your backlinks down.

I'm not exactly sure, can you tell us why you fired him?

[Tom L]

He could have blasted a 100,000 profile links to your site... and Google is unsure what to do about it... lol.

[JeanneLynn]

Wow, I guess this is a good lesson for us beginners. Be careful of firing the SEO man.

If I were in this situation, I'd probably try to hire him back.

[RatRaceWatch]

Well, you need to investigate your backlinks, look for anything missing. Hopefully things will recover for you, but let this be a lesson about putting most of your trust in another person. They can pull the rug right out from under you if you get on their bad side, and that's no good in any business venture (including IM).

Let this be an awakening to learn as much as you can about SEO, that way you can do your own troubleshooting when things go wrong. Trust me when I say, you'll be better off in the long run.

[KevinBolty]

Question is, why did you fire him?

Or if you did, you should have do it more 'friendly' way i suppose.

Definitelly he blasted you with thousands of backlinks, probably with different anchors also (can't check now tho).

[RatRaceWatch]

Originally Posted by KevinBolty

Question is, why did you fire him?

Or if you did, you should have do it more 'friendly' way i suppose.

Definitelly he blasted you with thousands of backlinks, probably with different anchors also (can't check now tho).

I'm not sure I agree with this statement, there's sort of a divide in the community on whether backlink blasts can hurt websites.

On the one side:
It doesn't make a lot of sense because you could just blast your competitors and work your way to the top by hurting their sites.

On the other side:
They believe google penalizes sites that receive a high amount of low quality spammy links in a short time.

Personally, the 1st side (it won't hurt) makes more sense.

And probably in his situation, he had some high pr contextual backlinks that were removed.

That's why it's always important (even if your not doing your own SEO), to know your backlinks, and understand what's going on behind the scenes.

[murrad]

Sorry to hear this..but the moral of the story is, never fire a SEO guy..he can do anything. Just wait for a week and I think google will bring your website back on decent ranking.

[webapex]

Could be time to bad mouth the seo guy, nobody wants to be married for life to one of these guys.

I had a quick look yahoo site explorer, (which may have outdated data since it's due to be closed)
The first 10 reported links, generally those deemed most valuable seem to no longer link to your site, your .org and blog follow those, the 1600+ links you got from site wide links on todaysrecipepro.com seem to be gone, that domain appears to be owned by
Barbara Garcia, La Verne, California

If she's an innocent 3rd party you might renegotiate a price for getting the lnks back
ing the links back. Though they might not have all that much seo influence.

[lamelie]

Originally Posted by RUSHYYZ

I'm in shock, my website was ranked 7th position Google valid daily and checked for 3 weeks straight, then I fired my SEO guy, and I checked ranking 2 days later and literally overnight, it comepletely dropped out of top 500 for my key word "beer gut"!!!! I am so upset!

beerandbody (d o t) c o m

Could he have sabotaged my site somehow?! I have heard that the infamous" google sandbox" is just a myth? Is this real and what do I do to fix this undeserving dilemma? Can I contact Google for explanation?

PLEASE, SEO experts tell me what to do....we worked so hard to get first page, is there a way of checking my status with Google and appealing?

The real question is, what is my fired SEO expert somehow spammed millions of low-quality links automatically, would that have caused the rapid overnight descent. And if so, WHAT WOULD PREVENT A COMPETITOR FROM DOING THE SAME THING TO DESTROY THEIR COMPETITION?!?

Here is the problem my friend. You have about 88 website linking your website. Imo, there is almost no possibility that you can get the 1st page of Google with that number of websites linking to your page. What your SEO did, he probably had tons of his own website network, got angy at you and removed them all, and opsss! It is all gone. You said you worked hard to get on the 1 page, but, obviously 88 links to your website CANNOT be a result of hard work. It can even take one hour. All you need to do is contact your SEO and HIRE him back, and then, tell him to keep the links there permanently. You have no other option, believe me.

[spradlig]

Just some related food for thought...

It seems to me that there is a lot of Black Hat SEO out there that could do your site a lot of good until someone tells Google what you are doing. If your SEO guy did some grey to black hat SEO on your site and then told Google about it after you fired him...

I'm not sure if G would drop you to 500th or delist you completely if that were the case though. (Probably depends on the severity of sin.)

However, it does sound - IMHO - like the SEO guy probably just removed your links from a whole slew of sites overnight. If he simply removed all the links - say from a WordPress template - it should have taken the G bot days, possibly weeks, to rescrape all those pages and remove their influence from your rankings though - not just a couple of days.

Beyond just the SEO implication of removing those links the rapid removal may have signaled to G that you were buying links which is frowned upon. Thus earning you a place at the bottom until your backlink situation settles out and becomes more stable.

[Jack Duncan]

Did you get this figured out yet?

Actually, there may be a much simpler cause to this...and it may actually have been the result of an affiliate promoting your product, and not even the "SEO guy".

You had hundreds of links to your site from a particular site (PM me for details) setup as a sitewide link in the sidebar.

That sidebar was changed, and your links are gone.

Though it shouldn't be that hard to fix if that site/issue was really to blame.

Couple of other tips:

1. Have you checked your Webmaster Tools account yet? Recently, Google dropped one of our sites a few spots due to a server load speed issue. Once we corrected the caching problem, which they notified us of inside our Webmaster Tools account, the site was fixed and shot right back to it's "rightful" place.

2. Did your "SEO guy" submit any kind of backlink reports on a regular basis? If yes, you can check to see if any of those links were removed.


Hope you can get everything back up and running soon.

All the best,
Jack Duncan

[trytolearnmore]

I'm not an expert, but can you really change the rankings overnight? Sure, you can delete the backlinks, but doesn't it take time for Google to notice that?

[User-Name]

The results are to drastic in to short a timeframe for what you describe
Somewhere on this forum there was a webmaster bosting that he builds backlinks via a 302 redirect
As soon as his clients stop paying he redirects them elsewhere.
How unethical is that?
You have most likely paid for months of backlinking and clowns like this say I will take my trainset and run.
Often I rent backlinks to give overall trust and stability if a client fired me I would have to show them where I was renting from.
Also I have stopped buying backlinks on several sites and it was some time before YSE was able to pick it up.
What you are describing is pretty drastic and dont fit those paterns

[Andyhenry]

Originally Posted by trytolearnmore

I'm not an expert, but can you really change the rankings overnight? Sure, you can delete the backlinks, but doesn't it take time for Google to notice that?

No.

I track my rankings on a daily basis and they change on a daily basis. I see the impact of seo work immediately. (i.e by the next update on my script that does the checking and tracks the ranking and trending)

The more competitive the term - the more it changes unless you've glued it to the top - which takes time.

[thekaver]

they could be a number of things thats happened!

1. its possible the seo guy has something to do with it, by either deleting backlinks, pulling ad swaps or even sabotaging your site.

2. The seo guy had used blackhat methods which give you short lived results and now has got you either peanlised or deindexed from google.

I had this done to me when i first started out and its not nice! I actually fired them after they got my deindexed!

3. The site has been sandboxed

thanks

Ryan Kavanagh (TheKaver)

[umrbd]

Even he deleted some links than still I don't think that the drop should be that much it is not normal because if he removes the link at once they will not be deindexed in Google at once but one by one so the rankings should have been dropped gradually. The site is may be sandboxed or may be slaped. The reason of putting a site in a sandbox can be spammy backlinks, not enough content or if the content is not updating

[chimpchampaign]

maybe kinda really hard penalty. that may happen, it's also possible that your site will be completely de-indexed. but that must not happen. build new good links and try to reorganize your content. optimize intern links and be patient ;-)

[harrietfredge]

Why did you fire your SEO guy if he has made you on the 7th place? Better hire him back and let that guy work out what was lost.

[GeorgR.]

No ranking gains with some drops first. Hope it's only a temporary penalty and you will back better than before in some weeks. Happens.

[Newbieee]

nah no one can hurt your ranking.

is just a matter of him removing all the links he did for you or simply no more new links. thus your ranking slid away.

if its so easy to hurt peoples ranking we all would be doing it and no one will be on google 1st spot for more than a day. =) hahaha!

[Andyhenry]

Originally Posted by Newbieee

nah no one can hurt your ranking.

if its so easy to hurt peoples ranking we all would be doing it and no one will be on google 1st spot for more than a day. =) hahaha!

Have you ever tested that theory?

I have.

[Newbieee]

Originally Posted by Andyhenry

Have you ever tested that theory?

I have.

hi there chef

not really, but the logic is there.

i meant that no one can build "bad" links to you and hurt your rankings.

what might have happen is like what you said, he took down all the links he built and stop building new ones too. that is why his rankings drain rocketed. [opposite of sky rocket]

im not saying by taking away the links it still wont hurt his ranking. =)

[Newbieee]

Originally Posted by Newbieee

hi there chef

=)

oh sorry, you are a drummer.

lol looked like you are in the kitchen with all your woks , so i called you a chef. hahaha