Was on front page - now stuck at rank ~200-700

[nicnac03]

I have a 1 year old website that was on the front page of google. About a few months ago it kept bouncing back and forth between front page and neverland.

It'll be on the front for a few days then disappear for a week or so and then come back. This happened for about a few months. But now it's been two months and it hasn't reappeared.

Has it been sandboxed again? It's already been sandboxed 8 months ago for a few weeks.

Google Analytics tells me it's currently ranking between postion 200-700 for most of it's keywords.

What can do about this?

[MaverickUK]

Sounds like you may have a BLOOP (backlink over optimisation penalty). Are you varying anchor text?

[nicnac03]

I do. Around 10 percent of the anchor text is something random like "click here".

If I did get a BLOOP penalty, is there a way to fix it?

[nicnac03]

If that's the case, couldn't I just go blast 1000 articles with the same anchor text to my competitor and destroy him as well? That's messed up.

[sonic74]

does your site have original content ?

also you can get over any bloop penalty if you be consistent with your backlink strategy

[nicnac03]

Yeah everything is handwritten by myself.

I'll keep building backlinks and see if things work out.

[MaverickUK]

Use more than just "click here", if people were linking to your website, do you think they would be using just 1, 2 or even 3 different words? Just add a lot of different keywords that look natural and give it a month or so. I'm suffering from a BLOOP and i'm in the process of trying to fix things.

You won't randomly get the penalty lifted after you hit a certain percentage of nautral looking backlinks, but you'll probably suffer from the penalty until its fixed, then you'll have to wait a number of weeks or months before the penalty is actually lifted.

[nicnac03]

I was told by a well known SEO expert that varying the anchor text too much results in you ranking for other terms instead.

Anyone have any sort of experience on this?

The dude said 90-95% of your anchor text should be your keyword.

I also heard that one guy NEVER varied his anchor text and was ranking highly. Then he proceeded to vary his anchor text and his rank started to drop.

Now I'm confused ???

[goldin432]

Originally Posted by nicnac03

I was told by a well known SEO expert that varying the anchor text too much results in you ranking for other terms instead.

Anyone have any sort of experience on this?

The dude said 90-95% of your anchor text should be your keyword.

I also heard that one guy NEVER varied his anchor text and was ranking highly. Then he proceeded to vary his anchor text and his rank started to drop.

Now I'm confused ???

When did this SEO expert tell you this? Google is always changing. What worked really well last year doesn't always work really well now. Content and backlinks will always be the foundation of SEO but there will always be major changes every so often that make it necessary to change your baclinking strategy. These days, using the same anchor text for all or almost all of your backlinks can definitely get your website banished from the first page. It's happened to a lot of people. It's never a sure thing, but it's a lot more likely to happen if you do it to a website that's relatively new.

You have to understand that Google has an image to maintain. It has to maintain the facade of being difficult to manipulate. If all or most of your backlinks have the same anchor text and/or were obviously created by you to get your ranking up for a specific keyword, Google has to punish your site to keep its reputation up. The trick is to avoid leaving a footprint. Google doesn't have anything against SEO, but it has to play this little game with website owners to avoid getting a reputation as a search engine that's easy to manipulate and whose top ranking websites are usually self promoters. Naturally, that would be bad for business.

Think of it this way: Google has a big yard and it just snowed. Getting from one side of the yard to the other is the equivalent of getting your site to rank well for the keyword or keywords you want. The problem is that Google is obsessed with keeping its yard free of footprints. It doesn't mind at all if you get to the other side of the yard as long as you don't get any footprints on it and ruin the way the fresh snow looks. You can fly across the yard, walk around it, or whatever you want, just don't mess up the way it looks.

[MaverickUK]

Originally Posted by nicnac03

I was told by a well known SEO expert that varying the anchor text too much results in you ranking for other terms instead.

Anyone have any sort of experience on this?

The dude said 90-95% of your anchor text should be your keyword.

I also heard that one guy NEVER varied his anchor text and was ranking highly. Then he proceeded to vary his anchor text and his rank started to drop.

Now I'm confused ???

Some people get away with not varying their anchor text, the majority of the others don't. I strongly doubt that his ranking drop after he started varying his anchor text and even if he did, it's unlikely to be related to the anchor text.

[goldin432]

Originally Posted by MaverickUK

Some people get away with not varying their anchor text, the majority of the others don't. I strongly doubt that his ranking drop after he started varying his anchor text and even if he did, it's unlikely to be related to the anchor text.

I agree, it was probably just a coincidence.

[nicnac03]

Good information Woody.

So I'm guessing that, even if the anchor text pointing to my page varies, my page will still rank for a specific keyword that I've chosen due to the on page SEO that's present?

[MaverickUK]

Not really, no. The most important factor for ranking well at the moment is through backlinks. To see this in action do a Google search for "click here" and you'll see what I mean. Proper optimisation will only make you rank higher than if you had no keyword optimised text.

[JRCarson]

It'll come back...



This is a picture I took a while ago of a rank checker chart from Market Samurai. It shows the Google ranking for the main keyword for one of my websites.

I know your circumstance is a little different with an extended drop-off, but this has happened to me numerous times with numerous sites. I think you need to just stay consistent with what you are doing, unless you are sending massive amounts of spammy links to your site of course!

[dp40oz]

Originally Posted by nicnac03

I was told by a well known SEO expert that varying the anchor text too much results in you ranking for other terms instead.

Anyone have any sort of experience on this?

The dude said 90-95% of your anchor text should be your keyword.

I also heard that one guy NEVER varied his anchor text and was ranking highly. Then he proceeded to vary his anchor text and his rank started to drop.

Now I'm confused ???

Seriously? Common sense buddy. You really think having the same anchor text 90% of the time looks at all natural. Look at how people link out. Every link usually has a different anchor text. The best results I have is when about 30% have the exact anchor text I want to rank for, another 30% have varied anchor text with my keyword included so if the keyword is "life insurance" i'll anchor with "life insurance prices" or "information on life insurance". Then the last 40% will be related text, the URL, click here ect…

SEO is about common sense and looking natural. Building 90% of your links with the same anchor text is like screaming to Google "I AM TRYING TO CHEAT YOU!"

[mmickeals]

There is an easy fix for this. Backlinks. Yes that is correct. All you need is more backlinks. Just keep linking away. Pay attention to your velocity and acceleration. Use these to figure out how many backlinks you should be building each day. Analyze your competition to determine how many backlinks you will need to rank 1. Then build them. Its an easy formula for success.

[DavidAmerland]

Everybody says here: 'Backlinks, get MORE backlinks' just when Google is in the process of discounting PageRank and downgrading backlinks even more. The Google Panda update which took place in March (I am guessing that the site started to fluctuate a little after that) was intended to filter out spammy sites or sites which looked like they were gaming Google and reward truly original or authoritative content. There have been three revisions to Panda (May, June & July), a number of legit sites have been penalized (inadvertently) and Content Farms have suffered as much as 40% drop in traffic.

Backlinks will not help here. An element of socialisation is needed (use Social Tagging sites plus post some content to Google+ and Facebook or Twitter) plus consistency in quality content and since we are at it I hope there is a permanent redirect merging the www and non-www URLs.

These three things alone should help to restore traffic, though without constant socialisation it will not go back to what it was before the Panda update.