14 replies to this topic

[Dragonusthei]

Hi

I submitted a few of my websites to a directory submission service(1000 directories).

Two days later they all lost their first page rankings, some vanished completely and some went back 3-4 pages.

Seven days later, still the same.

Does anyone know what I'm best to do here? try and get the links removed? wait(how long?)? Or is that it for these sites?

The domains were between 5-8 months old and had diverse links already built to them.

[Jill]

It's highly doubtful that the Submitting to Directories caused your problems.

[Dragonusthei]

Hi Jill

While I would love to agree, I have a few 100 sites.

The 8 I submitted the directories to got the problem, two days after(nice amount for indexing etc)

Nothing else was changed, or happed other than the directories.

[Jill]

If that's true, it sounds like you should just submit your competitor's sites to those directories then.

[Michael Martinez]

There's an easy way to find out if the directory links are your problem.

Pick one of your sites and file a reconsideration request explaining what you did. Leave out no details.

If your rankings are restored, then submit a reconsideration request for another site.

Do each 1 by itself.

If all 8 sites are restored after you file these reconsideration requests you will have established cause-and-effect.

[Dragonusthei]

@Michael - I'm not keen on going down the Google reinclusion request so soon, since I don't really want the web spam team looking at the other 140 websites I have.

@Jill - It would cost a fortune to pay for my competitors to have the same links thrown at them.

Does anyone have any idea, if removing the links will restore? or if waiting it out is a better choice?

[Michael Martinez]

If it's algorithmic and *IF* the links are the problem, then removing them should improve your search placement.

This may not be the best forum for you to openly discuss some of these issues. Jill gives pretty solid white hat advice, in my opinion, and it sounds like you may be close to the edge on some techniques.

[Dragonusthei]

If it's algorithmic and *IF* the links are the problem, then removing them should improve your search placement.

This may not be the best forum for you to openly discuss some of these issues. Jill gives pretty solid white hat advice, in my opinion, and it sounds like you may be close to the edge on some techniques.

A lot of the links will go away on their own, since a lot of these directories have Newest Links pages, and also list them in side bar. So I wonder if when these calm down and go away, it will help a bit?

I don't want to rush down the Google path.

[MarkPRichards]

If that's true, it sounds like you should just submit your competitor's sites to those directories then.

This seems to me to be the bottom line.

All the hysteria about Duplicate Content Penalties and suchlike misses the simple fact that by introducing such a sanction Google would be leaving itself wide open to abuse by any malign individuals who wanted to undermine their competitors.

Of course we would be unwise not to adhere to stated guidlines but there does sometimes seem to be a distinct absence of common sense when these matters are considered.

[Michael Martinez]

People HAVE been penalized by the sudden appearance of unwanted huge inventories of backlinks. In my experience, explaining to Google they had nothing to do with those links resolved the issues. I don't know if it's always that simple.

While I don't recommend anyone try to get a competitor knocked out of the SERPs, if you do make the effort, keep in mind that Google is the only card dealer at the table and they know more about how the deck of cards is organized than either of the players trying to make the other look like a cheater.

[chrishirst]

People HAVE been penalized by the sudden appearance of unwanted huge inventories of backlinks

HUGE being the operative word of course.

And of course the appearance of new links in any volume creates a need for the page to be re-evaluated which is probably why the people who think that only one page needs any external links find that the "home" page "goes missing" from time to time.

[CleverSEOGuy]

A reputable source divulged the fact that 3-400 backlinks per month is the cut-off for manual site review by the Big "G"!
As such, when you pummeled 1,000 backlinks at your sites the "red flags" were raised. Generally in influx of backlinks will cause any site to "dance", as they say, but it should recover within a week or two tops. If they do not recover there is only one single option available that will fix the SERPS ranking loss: remove the links...

[chrishirst]

About the only "reputable source" I trust for "information" is myself, and anybody who comes up with exact numbers is usually guessing.

If Amazon came up with 20.000 new links in a DAY it wouldn't raise a flag at Google.

If mattcutts.com came up with 500 new links in an HOUR of crawling it wouldn't raise a flag either.

As ever, there is a scale to everything search engines do, when you are dealing with billions of documents, and billions of billions of links every day, you don't deal with absolutes. For a page on a site that already has several hundred thousand links, a few hundred is nothing.
Conversely, a page on a site that has only has a few links and maybe a history of gaining a handful a week a few hundred more appearing might be cause for a closer look.

In a world that can change in a microsecond, things are rarely black and white,

[Michael Martinez]

3-400 seems rather low to me, too. The small number of cases I know about involved mind-boggling numbers of links, probably nearly all gotten from a single type of link resource.

[fastreplies]

Does anyone know what I'm best to do here? try and get the links removed? wait(how long?)? Or is that it for these sites?

Lets make something very clear in here.

1. Backlinks have nothing to do with your SERP. Period
Matt says that Google uses backlinks as small part of 200 different calculations made by algo
and if you have 1 or 1 million of backlinks, quality of them and not quantity is what counts
in the end of the day.

2. Jill is right about competition that would kill your site if this “backlinks spam” trick would
persuade Google to penalize your site every time someone dumps 10,000 links to your site.
Believing that something like that would work, is believing that people at Google are total
idiots who have no idea what is going on.

Your site can go up and down in SERP because of dozens of different reasons and all you can
basically do is patiently wait when it settles down.


fastreplies