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SEO post mortem - What killed it?

by petemcal
13 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I have been working on building up SEO for blog in my spare time. It has mainly been to gain experience in SEO and internet marketing.

I was doing really well towards my target of 2.5k unique visits a month.

After 2-3 months of work building up the content on my site and the external link structure I was getting 50-60 uniques a day so on target for around 1500-1600 uniques per month.

Then suddenly 2 days ago BOOM. I'm down to 10 visits a day. I'm going to give a walkthrough of my SEO activities and wondering if anyone can tell me where I went wrong.

(all of these have been built up slowly over time there have never been any big blasts of links to the site)
  • manual blog comments on both nofollow and dofollow only on relevant niche forums.
  • A couple of forum posts both nofollow and dofollow again only on relevant topics.
  • around 20-30 manual link directory submissions
  • Article directory submissions (only ezine and goarticles)
  • social bookmarking on blog posts
  • web 2.0s (all different unique content - relative to niche) with pyramids behind them bought from trusted and recommended fiverr seller
  • Answer site links both nofollow and dofollow
  • A few youtube description links (again relevant video topic)
  • 3 paid blogroll links (private deals not from public networks)
  • I also signed up to a blog network which came from a trusted referral. I have gained around 35 links from this network
  • 1 unique article wizard submission through a friends account which created 28 unique aricles with links.

I also have a backlinks indexer account in which I have been running my links through. I ran my entire backlink list through it 3 times over a course of about 2 weeks. So perhaps this is the fatal error? Too many low value links to my backlinks?

Or perhaps a competitor has spam blasted my site with links? However this seems unlikely seen as how it is a relatively specific and low competition niche.

Your thoughts are greatly appreciated!
#killed #mortem #post #seo
  • Profile picture of the author MikeWike
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    • Profile picture of the author Carl Brown
      I have had sites gone from google over 2 months, but then came back even stronger.
      From your lips to Google's ears! This gives me some hope for a recovery, but I won't hold my breath. Seems Google is determined to root out "unnatural backlinking."
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      • Profile picture of the author MikeWike
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        • Profile picture of the author Carl Brown
          That's something I've wanted to ask about. It's the keywords (2) that I specifically targeted that disappeared--until today. Like I said, my website that got penalized is mykeywordphrase.net

          Until today, the two keywords I targeted were the only ones that got penalized -- keyword phrase and another longer keyword.

          Until today my keyword phrase was #2. Today it got thrown back to #274. The site isn't old, but it's been stable until I did this.

          Until today I thought Google only penalized certain keywords they found you targeting, and not the entire site. Is this what Penguin does (penalize the keyword but not ALL minor keywords you might have ranked for)?
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  • Profile picture of the author WarGasm
    Google's purposefully trying to fk $hit up. Keep everyone confused, uncomfortable, guessing, and no idea what works and what doesn't is their strategy. Small sites with relatively weak profiles are bouncing all over the place right now.

    Google's hidden message here is to either build a huge authority site like wikipedia to solidify your spot, advertise your site to get non-search traffic, or try PPC (they're even getting stingy with that).
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  • Profile picture of the author steven Clayden
    fif you vary your anchor text or was you only targeting 1 keyword?
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  • Profile picture of the author petemcal
    Also I forgot to add that I have tried to vary my anchor text greatly. My targeted keyphrases were more heavily used in anchor text at first (maybe 40% of anchor text).

    Then when I started to rank for these phrases I tried diluting the anchor text with a lot more general phrases like click here, the acutal url, more information and very broad terms or longtail terms that include the targeted keyphrase. My reason for diltuing the anchor text was so I would not be penalized for having an unnatural anchor text profile.

    It was at this stage when I started diluting my anchor text that I dropped a little for my targeted keywords but my overall traffic increased due to longtail variations. Now I have dropped off of page 1 to page 2 for a lot of my targets. So perhaps it is that I have changed the SEO focus to something less related by overdiluting my anchor text?

    Thanks for all the replies so far! I love you guys, such a great community
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeWike
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    • Profile picture of the author petemcal
      Originally Posted by MikeWike View Post

      In the last week, did you made little bit more/less backlinks than usually or everything was normal? I mean, sometimes google does such things when your backlinks are made this way:

      day 1: 10 backlinks
      day 2: 10 backlinks
      day 3: 10 backlinks
      day 4: 0 backlinks
      day 5: 0 backlinks
      day 6: 0 backlinks
      day 7: 0 backlinks
      day 8: site gone from SERPS

      or the opposite, 0,0,0,20,20,40..
      For more detail please see the following image:

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  • Profile picture of the author petemcal
    Hey again, yeah I have been slowly increasing the number of links to the site.

    I think the only major jump was the UAW submission. But that seemed to coincide with the rise in traffic. I'm not sure if it was just coincidence - that's the problem with SEO haha
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  • Profile picture of the author petemcal
    If anyone has any further thoughts on this I'd really appreciate it (not that I don't appreciate all the input so far because I do! It has been very helpful).

    Thanks.
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  • Profile picture of the author Naimath
    If you had focused more on content and branding of your site, you wouldn't be so worried about the backlinks cause you'd attract them on your own.
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    • Profile picture of the author petemcal
      Originally Posted by Naimath View Post

      If you had focused more on content and branding of your site, you wouldn't be so worried about the backlinks cause you'd attract them on your own.
      I'm absolutely sick of people spouting this crap. Yes good content is essential because if you get your site ranked only good content can keep it there and bring in natural links.

      BUT

      I can almost guarantee you if any expert in any topic was to start writing a blog under a pseudo name and did not promote it or carry out SEO the chances of natural links coming in would be almost zero.

      You need to let the search engines know about good content, just posting it up is not enough. Trust me. I know that is what the aim of the panda/penguin updates were about and Google wants good content to be found like diamonds in the rough. But let's live in the real world, it just doesn't happen for 99.9% of the good content out there, it needs some form of promotion.
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      • Profile picture of the author Nicole7575
        Get a reliable consultant to take a look at your BL profile. Can it pass a human quality rater review?

        Login into your analytics & see if you can correlate the drop with any known algo update/re-run dates Google Algorithm Change History | SEOmoz

        Check your GWT for any unnatural link message.

        Best of luck!
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        • Profile picture of the author petemcal
          Originally Posted by Nicole7575 View Post

          Get a reliable consultant to take a look at your BL profile. Can it pass a human quality rater review?

          Login into your analytics & see if you can correlate the drop with any known algo update/re-run dates Google Algorithm Change History | SEOmoz

          Check your GWT for any unnatural link message.

          Best of luck!
          Hey thanks for your input, much appreciated!

          I had already checked my GWT and there are no unnatural link messages there. Can't seem to correlate the drop with a known algorithm change.

          I'm puzzled. It's a bit of a guessing game but I'm thinking it's either down to:
          • running my links through backlinks indexer too much
          • Spreading my anchor text too wide and making the site less targeted (as it's still there for the same terms just on page 2 instead of pos4/5 on page 1)
          • A slowing down of the rate of link building after the Unique Article Wizard submission
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  • Profile picture of the author petemcal
    Update, I think I may have figured it out.

    After running an index check on my backlinks the amount that are indexed is lowered by around 25% since my last check. I don't know if the blog network has been hit, or if it was due to me over spamming my backlinks with links. But one way or another I think this has played a big part.
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