Postmortem on a (possibly) failed site

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A few weeks ago, I began work on an authority site intended to drive visitors to Clickbank products. I spent a lot of time preparing a very specific strategy for creating the site, rolling out content, and backlinking. And for those first few weeks, things worked out really well. I was getting page 1 rankings for the vast majority of the articles I'd posted targeting the keywords that I was trying to rank for, and seeing a nice, steady stream of traffic.

Then a couple of days ago, every single page I was being ranked for dropped to page 6 or 7 on Google, and haven't recovered. Previously, it had been very common to see individual pages drop to very low rankings from time to time, but they'd tend to recover within a short time span. Clearly, something very different has happened this time around, and I'm attempting to figure out the cause.

I watched a video at the blog on Panda at seomoz (which I unfortunately can't link here due to my post count) which I found to be very informative. It sounds as though, post-Panda, Google is placing sites into the "good" and "not so good" categories based on a bunch of factors. I can see why my site might have been categorized as not having a great user experience.

There were a few tactical errors that I've come up with so far, that I believe may have gotten me the results that I'm currently seeing:

1. Bounce rate
The site was designed to get viewers in and out as quickly as possible. The articles on the site weren't particularly well written (hey, when you're trying to rank for some of these long tail keywords and give them 2% density, creating something that doesn't sound like garbage can be a hefty task!) I basically just wanted people to click my affiliate link ASAP. Which Google does not like.

2. Close to 0 actions per visitor
Again: Designed to get visitors in and out. Visitors had no real reason to click around my site. They'd tend to see the page and either immediately go back or click my affiliate link.

3. I installed Google Analytics
I remember reading a story on this forum from someone who had a bunch of sites and installed GA on a couple of them. SERPS rankings on these specific sites went down dramatically while the others retained their rankings. I'm inclined to believe that this could have been pure coincidence (and I certainly don't want to spread misinformation), but in the future I'll refrain from using GA. Woopra seems to work quite well as an alternative, anyways.

If you want to check out the site, it's at how-to-get-abs-expert (add a .com). I hadn't added the Reviews page referenced in the header and sidebar until after my site's rankings went down. I suspect something like that (i.e. a piece of truly useful content) would have helped the situation a bit if I'd implemented it sooner.

I'm going to continue working on other sites, but hopefully my rankings will return in the coming weeks. Who knows, maybe I'll be back in business tomorrow. If not, lesson learned I suppose.

Thoughts, similar experiences, tips on avoiding this sort of thing?
#search engine optimization #failed #possibly #postmortem #site
  • Wait it out! You are experiencing the Google dance. Especially considering your website is a few "weeks old" and already has 355 backlinks!

    This is normal for most websites that build links in this nature.

    Nothing to freak out about. Keep building more content, and more backlinks. Be sure that you don't only link your homepage either. You'll want to also link your internal pages and target additional keywords for those pages as well. Mixing up your anchor text is also important when linking to your homepage/internal pages. Think like a search engine, which is basically a big "math problem".
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    • Ah yes, the Google Dance

      I'd always thought that was more in reference to stuff like, for example, my individual pages dropping down a bunch of pages and then popping back up on page 1 within a short period of time. The fact that all of my pages dropped down and stayed there had struck me as a potentially really bad thing.

      As far as my backlinking strategy goes, I tend to build a lot of links to my home page, and a lower (but still significant) number of links to my individual pages that target their keywords. I could certainly stand to vary my anchor text more, though I kind of doubt that Google would actually apply a penalty for too many backlinks that use the same anchor text.. That would allow me to screw my competitors by building a bunch of crappy links with the same anchor text to their sites! Still you're right, varied anchor text can't be a bad thing.

      I'm curious: when varying anchor text, is it recommended to still include the main keyword that you're trying to rank for? (i.e. anchor text "how to lose weight fast" when the keyword is "how to lose weight")

      Regardless of whether or not this site returns to its former positioning, I'm going to stick with the plan of building my sites to yield a lower bounce rate and higher number of actions within the site through quality content..
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    Postmortem on a (possibly) failed site

    A few weeks ago, I began work on an authority site intended to drive visitors to Clickbank products. I spent a lot of time preparing a very specific strategy for creating the site, rolling out content, and backlinking. And for those first few weeks, things worked out really well. I was getting page 1 rankings for the vast majority of the articles I'd posted targeting the keywords that I was trying to rank for, and seeing a nice, steady stream of traffic. Then a couple of days ago, every single page I was being ranked for dropped to page 6 or 7 on Google, and haven't recovered. Previously, it had been very common to see individual pages drop to very low rankings from time to time, but they'd tend to recover within a short time span. Clearly, something very different has happened this time around, and I'm attempting to figure out the cause.