Buying links from WSO caused major damage?

[bigfishingshop]

Six weeks ago my 1 1/2 year-old website was cruising along with a pagerank of 4 and I was getting about 75,000 impressions a month in Google search results. They indexed over 5000 links to my site, and I was on page 1 for many of my keywords, including several #1s.
I wanted to improve those numbers, and after searching hundreds of WSOs on backlink packages, I settled on a "high PR backlink package" that had hundreds of excellent reviews.
About a week later the bottom fell out:
-my PR dropped from 4 to 3
-my search results dropped so far it now says "no data available"
-my top-most keyword is now on page 30
-one keyword dropped from #1 to #1000+!
-indexed links dropped to 120 from 5000
I made no changes to my site during this time period. I should point out that the Warrior Forum member that I bought the package from did a very poor job on the forum links - my main keyword is "fishing", and on most of the profile links he listed the keyword as "golf".
Could that be the cause of my "spanking" from Google?
In the WSO he stated that the links would only help with search results, bringing several client's sites to page one.
I have a list of the links - but I don't have the password(s) to the individual forum accounts, so I have no way to delete the profiles that contain the links.
Someone please help!

[seotechnician]

If the keyword is listed as "golf" when it should be "fishing", You could get a Google Smack.

This definitely appears to be the fall of your PR rank.

Other than correct the damage that has been done, the only thing you can do now is some article marketing and other forms of SEO to build your reputation.

[tpw]

Originally Posted by bigfishingshop

my main keyword is "fishing", and on most of the profile links he listed the keyword as "golf".

Could that be the cause of my "spanking" from Google?

In the WSO he stated that the links would only help with search results, bringing several client's sites to page one.

I have a list of the links - but I don't have the password(s) to the individual forum accounts, so I have no way to delete the profiles that contain the links.

Someone please help!

Yes, that could have been the issue.

Until recently, your website has been about "fishing", and now it is about "golf"...

Sending mixed signals like that to Google causes it to not know where to place your rankings, so everything went down.

As far as the fix, hopefully the person who sold you the package will give you access to the default account names and passwords, so that you can fix it...

Otherwise, you will have to go back and do a new linking campaign with the right keywords in place, to let Google know that you did not change the focus of your website.

[Will Edwards]

There may be no real damage and the site may well return to its previous position or, more likely I think, slightly lower position than you had before.

With regard to 'fixing' the golf anchor text, categories or descriptions, I think if you were to do that, it might have a similar effect a 2nd time i.e. you could be penalised again.

You will just have to wait and see what happens. If your site returns to a similar position as before, you should be grateful that no real damage has been done. But personally, I think that G is much more savvy post-Panda and buying forum links would be a complete no-no as far as I am concerned.

If your site's ranking returns to normal or near normal, you should seek some additional links from good quality relevant sites and perhaps you will be able to redeem the situation.

Good luck.

Will

[Audrey Harvey]

Originally Posted by tpw

As far as the fix, hopefully the person who sold you the package will give you access to the default account names and passwords, so that you can fix it...

Hopefully the person who sold you the package will go back and fix his mistake.

[Alexmark]

I think upting out some new articles is a good idea to help Google put your site where it needs to be. Make sure you get your keyword right! lol

As for the fellow warrior, I think I would have some strong words with him.

[DubDubDubDot]

Legitimate SEO services charge a fortune and guarantee ranking results.

Never trust anyone claiming to be an SEO guy. That business is literally 99.9% wannabes that can do more harm to your rankings than good.

[WillR]

Wait a minute - you BOUGHT links? and they haven't improved the rankings of your website? Right, so where is the part you don't understand here? I'm confused...

Remember what Dad taught us. If it sounds to good to be true... it IS!

The mistake was made NOT by the person who provided the links for you. The mistake was made by YOU purchasing the links in the first place. Unfortunate but true.

[retirewithsandie]

Originally Posted by Audrey Harvey

Hopefully the person who sold you the package will go back and fix his mistake.

That's what I was wondering too. Have you gone back to the seller to have him fix his mistakes?

[WillR]

Originally Posted by retirewithsandie

That's what I was wondering too. Have you gone back to the seller to have him fix his mistakes?

The damage has been done. Google isn't THAT stupid.

[Underground SEO]

Originally Posted by WillR

The damage has been done. Google isn't THAT stupid.

That's where you are wrong. Anything with seo is fixable over time. If it weren't then I could easily go to each of my competitors sites and send then irrelevant links and knock their rankings - it doesn't work like that anymore. Google has smartened up to this, just try sending xrumer links directly to your money site, it used to harm your rankings but now it does very little as that was a tactic used to destroy the competition previously and I google has acknowledged and adapted in light of this.

[WillR]

Originally Posted by Underground SEO

That's where you are wrong. Anything with seo is fixable over time.

That's not what I said. I said in response to the people who are saying the links should be fixed that the damage has already been done. How do you think it looks to Google when one day a whole heap of links are using the anchor text 'golf' and the next day all of a sudden they are changed to the anchor text 'fishing'.

With these set of links the damage HAS already been done. I never said he should not continue to build links to the site. He made a mistake by purchasing these links, he should learn from his mistake, move on and start building fewer high quality links than cheap blasts of useless links.

[tpw]

Originally Posted by DubDubDubDot

Legitimate SEO services charge a fortune and guarantee ranking results.

Never trust anyone claiming to be an SEO guy. That business is literally 99.9% wannabes that can do more harm to your rankings than good.

You sound as if you actually believe that?

[GeorgR.]

There is a likelihood your site will come back later and ranking better than before.

But, you need to take into account that LINK VELOCITY is also an important factor, short: You cannot simply start to build un-natural links from one day to the other - google will catch up with this.

A site does not get many good PR links "over night"..if you do link building you always have to keep a natural pace and try not to over-do it. Diversity is important too.

[onegoodman]

hmmm, many mixed signals here .

First, I would say it happens, and I have the same issue buying a package from someone on eBay apparently he was newbie.

He sold me around 10,000 link, and instead of use they keyword I asked for, he use a weird name.

It is a bad hit on google, but I would say ask him to correct it (If he using a software, he can over write it or delete them).

I would also tell you to slow down and start doing some manual work yourself.

Everybody doing some automated backlinks work, but at the end of the day, it is the white SEO that cover your website.

It will take you a while but you can get back, where you used to be. You can be back where you were if a week or so.

[BIG Mike]

Normally, I suggest taking a deep breath and waiting a couple of weeks before jumping the gun. But in this case...

Obviously the word "Golf" as anchor text was stupid. Normally, Google would simply ignore it, if it were just a few links.

However, I still suspect all is not lost - with the recent update, a lot of sites got shuffled around.

Step 1 - Get the person who did this to go back and fix it. Also, make him remove any links that are any sites unrelated to yours (except forums).

Step 2 - I still suggest not panicking...you can always contact Google and tell them that someone made a bunch of unrelated backlinks without your knowledge (which is true), to kill your site in SERPS. Google is supposed to protect against this, so they may fix it for you.

Step 3 - Done properly, backlinks can give a huge boost to SERPS. Sit down, figure out a plan of attack and start getting good quality links out there to various pages on your site with solid anchor text.

[nbw]

Originally Posted by bigfishingshop

Six weeks ago my 1 1/2 year-old website was cruising along with a pagerank of 4 and I was getting about 75,000 impressions a month in Google search results. They indexed over 5000 links to my site, and I was on page 1 for many of my keywords, including several #1s.
I wanted to improve those numbers, and after searching hundreds of WSOs on backlink packages, I settled on a "high PR backlink package" that had hundreds of excellent reviews.
About a week later the bottom fell out:
-my PR dropped from 4 to 3
-my search results dropped so far it now says "no data available"
-my top-most keyword is now on page 30
-one keyword dropped from #1 to #1000+!
-indexed links dropped to 120 from 5000
I made no changes to my site during this time period. I should point out that the Warrior Forum member that I bought the package from did a very poor job on the forum links - my main keyword is "fishing", and on most of the profile links he listed the keyword as "golf".
Could that be the cause of my "spanking" from Google?
In the WSO he stated that the links would only help with search results, bringing several client's sites to page one.
I have a list of the links - but I don't have the password(s) to the individual forum accounts, so I have no way to delete the profiles that contain the links.
Someone please help!

If that's the case then I could buy that link package and instruct them to use the wrong anchor text pointing to one of my competitor's sites
causing them to have a drop in PR and loss in rankings.

Can't be that easy can it?

[eubertmo]

I learned my lesson that way recently, too.

[John Moore]

Great! Now all I have to do is buy fiverr gigs using spammy anchor text to my competitor sites and I'm WINNING

[mattlaclear]

Originally Posted by WillR

Wait a minute - you BOUGHT links? and they haven't improved the rankings of your website? Right, so where is the part you don't understand here? I'm confused...

Remember what Dad taught us. If it sounds to good to be true... it IS!

The mistake was made NOT by the person who provided the links for you. The mistake was made by YOU purchasing the links in the first place. Unfortunate but true.

So the link vendors here on the forum are selling ineffective services that don't help their clients serp rankings? Care to explain all the testimonials on their WSO threads posted by Warriors claiming their services helped improve their serp positions?

Vendors have been selling backlinks here on the forum long enough to prove that purchasing backlinks is not only safe but also very beneficial.

Otherwise Warriors would quit buying their services in droves.

Sometimes the dad who thinks something is too good to be true ends up getting waxed by the dad who didn't think that.

[dcristo]

Originally Posted by WillR

Wait a minute - you BOUGHT links? and they haven't improved the rankings of your website? Right, so where is the part you don't understand here? I'm confused...

Remember what Dad taught us. If it sounds to good to be true... it IS!

The mistake was made NOT by the person who provided the links for you. The mistake was made by YOU purchasing the links in the first place. Unfortunate but true.

You are right, but for the wrong reason.

[bigfishingshop]

Let me say first that I want to thank each and every one of you who replied to this thread, You guys are great! I didn't realize that backlinking is a subject of great debate in this forum. Wow, many different opinions here! Anyway, I emailed the WF member who sold me the backlink package explaining my problem and got the following reply:

Upon receiving you email, I immediately checked your report and saw your post on warrior forum.


The thing is that, I was unable to find any profile which is linking to your site with the anchor text - "golf (because of which you are suspecting your ranking decrements).


An anchor text is a clickable text which is linking to your site. These are some profiles where there is a mention of the word "golf", but it us under "interest" and not under "signature" and it is not clickable, thus is can't be considered as anchor text (infact many profiles do not have any anchor text.


But if you find any profile with anchor text -"golf", then please send me the URL.


Following are some examples:


The text "golf" is not clickable, thus it is not anchor text

He then shows some screenshots of a few forum profiles with a link to my site, and like he said, the word "golf" is in the "interests" column and is not clickable.
Hmmm, this can't help, but maybe it doesn't hurt either. I guess maybe Google's algos detected some links from not-so-good forums that are totally irrelevant to my site's content, and smacked me for that? Why the guy would put "golf" instead of "fishing" I have no idea, and unfortunately all of the PR 6 and up links have the word "golf" listed. But again, it is not anchor text and is not clickable.
There are a few threads in here that discuss backlinking, and apparently , the debate goes on. Here is a good one:
Its easy for Google to tell if you've bought backlinks...

Thanks again to all who replied, meanwhile I am going to continue to work hard at putting more good content on my site and do some very selective link building, forum posting, social networking, article writing, etc. I hope the big G will, in time, forgive me for buying links - no matter what anyone says, I'll never, never do it again.

[36burrows]

Maybe start selling golf supplies?

[paulgl]

If the premise is true, then that would mean every
one that used the service would all see drops. Unless
the premise is flawed.

Here's a tip: Start fishing with golf balls.

Golf Fishing with Mike West in the Morning -...

Paul

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by paulgl

If the premise is true, then that would mean every
one that used the service would all see drops. Unless
the premise is flawed.

That logic is fatally flawed. All sites would have to be the same and google would have to operate under a one rule algo. Since the algo has many different ways and layers in rating a site its entirely possible that one site could do well, another site would see no effect and yet another might tank.

For example a site that had some authority links might stand up fine with forum links because its authority links another could tank because it has only bad links etc, many others don't make any movement. And for the guy that suggested that because something keeps selling in WSOs section it works -

bwhahaha LOL

If that were the case almost everybody would be making money online since money online products sell like crazy.

Forum backlinks are a crock when it comes to ranking. any link will move you up if you have nothing but I can't find a single truly competitive serp where those links do any heavy lifting.

[Apollo-Articles]

Four possible reasons:

1) Mix up of Anchor text (Google confusion)
2) Link velocity (Suddenly building loads of links gets flagged in Google)
3) Majority of page links all being the identical anchor text (You need to vary your anchor text sometimes and even just include the actual URL in your links this way it looks more natural)
4) Lack of nofollow links (Again if all your links are follow this will may get flagged in Google - it's not natural...)

People moaning about buying links don't know what they're talking about.

But if I was you, I'd avoid building profile links directly to your webpages.

Work out what caused the problem and then fix it. I have a feeling it's a mixture of 1,2 and 3.

Sam

[bigfishingshop]

Originally Posted by yukon

I'm a little confused in what OP actually expected from something like an Xrumer blast?

How many PR9s did you get, I'm talking about your backlink being on the same exact page as the PR9?

I kinda doubt you got any PR9s from the WSO I'm looking at in your profile. Just saying...

You are correct - I made a bad mistake, learned from it, and will now move on. I guess I got caught up in all of the hype from reading the excellent reviews on the WSO. Rest assured that will not happen again.

[bigfishingshop]

Originally Posted by 36burrows

Maybe start selling golf supplies?

That's funny

[bigfishingshop]

Originally Posted by Apollo-Articles

Four possible reasons:

1) Mix up of Anchor text (Google confusion)
2) Link velocity (Suddenly building loads of links gets flagged in Google)
3) Majority of page links all being the identical anchor text (You need to vary your anchor text sometimes and even just include the actual URL in your links this way it looks more natural)
4) Lack of nofollow links (Again if all your links are follow this will may get flagged in Google - it's not natural...)

People moaning about buying links don't know what they're talking about.

But if I was you, I'd avoid building profile links directly to your webpages.

Work out what caused the problem and then fix it. I have a feeling it's a mixture of 1,2 and 3.

Sam

Thank you Sam - good advice.

[RevSEO]

Chances are your rankings will be back soon, it sounds like you only bought some 'Angela/Paul' style backlinks, basically profiles from high PR domains. These links are a dime a dozen and there's hundreds of thousands of websites that use this type of backlinking method.

What you are experiencing is simply the Google dance, your sites are still indexed which is good. How many links were built? When did you see the drop in rankings?

[kposs]

Hard lesson to learn.

Since your followup indicates he may not have used the incorrect anchor text, I agree with Sam. Most likely a combination of the link velocity, link type (forum profiles) and lack of variation in the anchor text.

Personally, I would never use forum profiles to promote my main site. I only use them to get my other backlinks (articles) indexed.

[RevSEO]

Originally Posted by kposs

Personally, I would never use forum profiles to promote my main site. I only use them to get my other backlinks (articles) indexed.

Good advice, most profile services are simply spray and pray approach. They use tools like Xrumer to simply spam hundreds or even thousands of forums to build links. It doesn't matter the forum as long as they can get a profile link on it.

Don't use these on your money sites, instead *if* you use these kinda services use them for your indexing your backlinks.

[bigfishingshop]

Originally Posted by RevSEO

Chances are your rankings will be back soon, it sounds like you only bought some 'Angela/Paul' style backlinks, basically profiles from high PR domains. These links are a dime a dozen and there's hundreds of thousands of websites that use this type of backlinking method.

What you are experiencing is simply the Google dance, your sites are still indexed which is good. How many links were built? When did you see the drop in rankings?

I bought the package around the middle of July - 250 backlink package, but ended up with 552 links. (2 PR8 profile links, 5 PR7, 43 PR6, 100 PR5, etc. etc.)
The Google smack happened at the end of July. Now, not even one of my keywords is in the top 100 - I used to have several on page 1, including a couple of #1s. One keyword went from #1 to #1000+ !
A very hard smack indeed.

[bigfishingshop]

UPDATE: My search traffic is coming back slowly but surely. (2500 impressions yesterday-to-today). Main keywords are back up to around page 11-13. All I did so far is remove a bunch of directory links at the bottom of my homepage, and cleaned up my homepage HTML a bit. Next I will no-follow all affiliate links, and add content, add content, and then add more content. After that I'll add more content, then add some content.
Thanks to all who helped!

[Christine2011]

Originally Posted by bigfishingshop

UPDATE: My search traffic is coming back slowly but surely. (2500 impressions yesterday-to-today). Main keywords are back up to around page 11-13. All I did so far is remove a bunch of directory links at the bottom of my homepage, and cleaned up my homepage HTML a bit. Next I will no-follow all affiliate links, and add content, add content, and then add more content. After that I'll add more content, then add some content.
Thanks to all who helped!

This sounds good

Thanks for sharing your experience as well...It helps a lot reading the warriors comments and suggestions...

Wish you well

[xurgoth]

Originally Posted by bigfishingshop

UPDATE: My search traffic is coming back slowly but surely. (2500 impressions yesterday-to-today). Main keywords are back up to around page 11-13. All I did so far is remove a bunch of directory links at the bottom of my homepage, and cleaned up my homepage HTML a bit. Next I will no-follow all affiliate links, and add content, add content, and then add more content. After that I'll add more content, then add some content.
Thanks to all who helped!

Just curious, is everything back to normal?