So bummed....I have been deranked

Things do have a tendency to move around, so don't get discouraged. What is important is you are making a site that is worthwhile. If you get that part right, people will start to not only visit, but RETURN. Once that pattern starts to take place, you will see the rankings improve too. You shouldn't have to feel like you need to "play" with the SEO all the time. That said, make sure you are thoughtful especially of your Title tag and anchor text, and that you are building links consistently over time, but not getting too deep into spammy methods. For example, why not add a link to your site in your signature here? (that should help some with 100 posts, not just SEO but visitors)

Why dont you post your site so we can have a look, cant tell without seeing the site ? the word cloaked did catch my eye lol, if you think its those that did it just remove them and see what happenes when you get re-spidered.

Could be nothing, might just return in a few days who knows !

Woc

Don't be too worried April, it will come back. I don't think any of what you did hurt it, I think Google is just re-evaluating your site.

I've actually been experiencing this with a lot of my sites over the past few weeks. A couple of sites I had been working on and changing and others have been untouched for months.

I've also noticed for those sites, when I check up on them in google webmaster tools, I'm getting dashes ( -- ) on the crawl errors instead of numbers.

Same as with your site, they were indexed, google bots were crawling the sites and even indexing new content but the sites weren't ranking for anything other than some oddball foreign google searches and google image searches.

So, you're not alone.

It's something different from the typical google dance as I've experienced it in the past.

The good news is the sites have been coming back to life. One by one they are returning back to where they were before. It's taken about two weeks from the time they died to when thy came back to life.

I use the gocodes wordpress plugin to cloak almost all of my affiliate links and I haven't noticed any issues.

The most important thing when this stuff happens is not to panic, don't make any rash changes to your site and give it a couple of weeks.

Unless your site has been banned it will eventually come back. In the meantime, work on a different site. Keeping all of your eggs in one basket is a bad idea.

Also, when your making changes to your site. If you make a lot of changes at once it hard to know what might be helping or hurting your site. Try to space out the changes you make over a longer period of time. I know this isn't always easy to do but it makes it easier to track how these changes are effecting your sites performance.

Don't worry, in our circle we call it double dipping, new sites always double dip. Most of my new sites have traffic graphs that look like /|_/|_/ because google kept throwing them around.

I don't recommend making drastic changes to your site, because if you do, when the site comes back you'll never know what really worked.

If it's not back in 2 weeks then start adding new pages to the site every week. In my experience new content shortens the recovery process.

don't get discouraged - it's perfectly normal for things to move around the rankings before they settle, just keep employing the same strategy and in a few weeks you'll probably see it bounce back up there.

I would have loved to save seen it before. It still has the feel of a one page site. The navigation needs work. Even your navigation should give an indication of what the site is about.

Your really pack the paid survey keyword in there especially the first half of paragraph four. You need an article that has related words as well as the keyword. Google looks for this. I don't think you are far off. You might even see it rebound without changing anything.

How long were you at those positions before it fell?

A couple of my sites were de-ranked too in Google yesterday. They are still indexed but not ranking for any keywords. All of my other sites are fine though.

Hi there

Well im not a big fan of those affilate links they do stand out a mile, interestingly why havent u no followed them along with your other external links ??

I would be tempted to leave it a while, it might come back, maybe remove the affiliate links at a later date if it doesnt return and see what happens then.

I think you have a nice site with well written content I can tell you put the effort in and I tend to agree with the bloke on google webmaster forums im afraid, as I dont use affiliate links like that in any of my sites, they stand out so much. Im sure dozens of people will post saying they use them fine however lol, just my opinon anyhow.

Woc

Man can that be a bummer. I'm bummed just because we aren't moving up, to say nothing of moving down. My sympathies.

...I read down this whole thread and couldn't help but notice you said you had stuff like "cloaked" affiliates {just links? or what?} lots of paid survey stuff, etc. I've heard Google interprets cloaking as black hat and sites with too many ads as spammy. I don't know if you meant you had a lot of ads on your site or not...just taking a stab at this.

Beginning of March is also not very long ago. Newer sites seem to often be unstable in the search engines. This actually follows a pattern I see when a big news story breaks. Those pages with the story rise up fast, but once the story isn't new anymore, just try finding them with those same keywords. News articles from 2 or 3 months ago just don't rank highly unless relevant stuff is still going on. Google's search engine has fine tuned itself to informative sites in particular, so this may relate to why non-news pages also show an early rise and then a sudden drop, as if maybe Google is trying to figure out if they're a short term page {news story} or long term page {educational/informative/entertainment etc.}

I hear that though it removes outgoing link juice, it still indexes the links {which is fine} and still counts them as OBL's on your site {which is not so good}. All that it does is remove the link juice from the site the link points to. If you have a link farm on your site, putting them all nofollow will still count to Google as a link farm. Or so I have read and heard.

Hi there

Seems someones answered the no follow tag quite well, just Google it if you need more info just a way of making your outgoing links less important, since your linking to affiliate sites you dont own, why pass them any importance ?

If you had 100s of errors in webmaster tools then yeah it might be a problem but 17 is nothing, all my sites have something like that number there, so I reckon its not that.

However no follow your links and wait, as everyone has had a site disapear at some point, get used to it because it will happen again u will panic less as you get used to it lol.

I read the blokes post on google webmaster forums, it was a quite excellent answer,

"Good luck with whatever you do but I'll stick with an opinion that bearing in mind you seem to have the ability to create a site, write good content of your own, using those abilities in the current format is an abject waste"

Ive never had a review anything like that with any of my sites lol

Woc

Hi aprilm,

That really sucks but I think your rank might recover. It takes google sometime to adjust to your new content.

Congrats, I just did a search and you were #5

Hi there

Hmm have had a bit of a look at it today, I think you should maybe tweek your content a little, its quite hard to spot but you do mention paid legitimate surveys quite a lot lol, and all your images are using the same keywords, at a guess thats the keywords your going for. So you use your 3 keywords 8 times in the first section at the top of your site. Which if you think about it is quite a lot for a 3 word keyword.

I know its quite hard but you need to make your content look natural, when i struggle I get someone to write it for me, as I do the same and tend to mention my keywords far too often, as i know i need to get them into the content.

I would say I was probably being picky there as well, as other than that I cant see that much wrong on the face of it.

Woc

lol my advice is to stop checking on it, yup it looked spammy to me after i looked deeper, just keep working at your content, I think you defo over done it a bit on the keywords, try not to have any content that just repeats what you have already said, the key is always good quality, just say what you need to say dont over say or under say anything.

Woc

I think your site looks great. I see no obvious problems with your onpage SEO, but would always make the outbound affiliate links "nofollow" if they are not.

One thing that "may" be a concern: I think you should use this plug in for your privacy page WordPress › Easy Privacy Policy WordPress Plugins You can add anything you want to it, but it contains the language that Google insists we put into websites that run adsense -- I know you don't have adsense -- but google is attempting to make the searches as "safe" and "relevant" as possible, so they really like to see TOS, Privacy Policy, etc.

As a side note, for esthetical reasons, I would put in the footer instead of the nav.

Also, I can't believe you aren't backlinking, posting, bookmarking, etc. Off site SEO is very very important to SERP. Angela's packages are great or you can easily find your own. It's also very effective to do some natural commenting with sigs, create web 2 sites/free blogs that link to your site, write articles, do videos. You can't underestimate the power of SEO fundamentals.

If you need help with the offsite SEO, let me know. You'll get it back. Don't worry, it happens to the best of us.

I have also experienced that before with the site I'm working on.

Here are few questions that you can evaluate in this scenario.
1. How competitive are your keywords?
2. How many links did you lost?
3. How often do you build links?

If you haven't seen any problem after answering these questions. I'm sure your site will go back to its rankings.

April, I know how you feel....man do I ever....this business is tough. I have been at it for so long, probably about a year now, and i finally came across something that was earning me a solid $100 a day profit...then, all of a sudden today, my adwords account (thats google speak for paid advertisements on google), is under review.

After finnally speaking with a google rep today, i have an idea of what is wrong, but now my account is at risk of being closed. IT sucks to work so hard for so long, and finally make it to a comfortable position, only to see it blasted away by an algorithm...

My point is, do you think I stopped today? Do you think, after just going from $100 a day to nothing, I just threw in the towel and said "to hell with internet marketing"? No, I worked on some other sites, added content to a few blogs, emailed about 2 dozen website owners about a possible joint venture, and did research on another tactic.

The point of my post is not to help you with your site, you have enough great suggestions from our fellow warriors. You just need to keep on truckin...keep on making sites, keep on building backlinks, keep on writing articles, keep making videos, keep doing whatever it is you do to drive traffic to your site. Eventually, you'll hit a sweet spot that will show you there is some truth to this whole internet marketing fuss.

I was gonna pm you this, but figured some newbies could use some inspiration. I hope it helps.

Hi April, I just wanted to share this with you. I learned early on in my IM career that if I spent countless hours/days obsessing over one sites rankings I would be headed nowhere fast.

In this business you really can't have all of your eggs in one basket. I tend to work on at the very minimum three sites at a time. I do this for many reasons, 1. I need to keep myslef as busy as possible, 2. if one site doesn't perform well I dont have to worry about it as much as I have plenty others to work on, and 3. I don't ever want my entire income to be dependent on the success of one site.

Google is a very unreliable monopolistic beast... On any day of the week some of my higher earning pages can rank anywhere from #1 to #20 and it gets worse for newer sites.

This is why I focus on building so much virtual real estate. Of course it is nice to have that one huge mansion but when hurricane google rolls through and blows your house down you have to have a backup plan.

My advise to you is to start working on another site or two while you continue to build links to this one. This will help you to keep your mind off of this sites ranking, bring in more income, and learn more by not making the same mistakes with the new sites that you may have with this one. As you continue to build more you will start to realize little by little things that you did wrong the last go round and improve on them.

BTW I think your site look nice and I can tell you have worked pretty hard on it, unfortunately there is a such thing as trying "too hard". If the site is more of a labor of love then a potential cash cow then you should continue to focus all of your efforts on it. If not then do as you said and keep on truckin (to your next site) this site will reappear in the near future so long as you build links to it consistently, but in the meantime don't get hung up on it...

Good Luck...

Gary..

I just created a post about porn infected studiopress themes that I downloaded for free. I have no idea if this applies to your theme but your post reminded me to warn people about my findings. You might want to check although I have no idea if an infected theme would affect your rankings.

Techguy

Congrats...

April,

If you're working with a new domain then it's completely normal for this type of stuff to happen. Google is going to re-evaluate your site several times over the first few months that you have content on the site. Research the "Google Dance" for more information about that.

We experienced a DRAMATIC 90 rank DROP in one of our sites. It went from rank 8 to rank 98... But it came back 5 days later and was rank 4!

I recommend this sneaky strategy... Make like 3 Ezines and put back links to your site... 1 with the anchor text and one using the full URL as the anchor text.


Google LOVES Ezines and I bet this will have your site back in the SERPS after a few days. AT least, that's what we did to our site when we experienced the drop off,good luck!

Joe

^^^ Did you even bother to read the last post?:rolleyes: