Thread: Problem with my SERP

Hi there,

I have been developing and writing to my blog for the last 4 months or so, and have really managed to do fairly well within Google for each of my blogs targeted keywords. I mostly rank around 3rd-4th for the topic I am writing which has seen me receive an average of about 40 organic searches a day, which I'm hoping to keep increasing.

I recently tried to mix things up a bit and experiment with having links to very high PR related sites (such as a Wikipedia, About, BBC page etc) and added it into the footer. The next day, I didn't receive any organics.. and this has occurred ever since. Having checked in the IMT Tools > SERP Checker, all of my keywords vanished out of the Top 100.

Having looked in Webmaster Tools, there was an awful lot of errors relating to the link - for some reason the links worked on general pages - but the /tag/ pages within in WordPress were adding the links to follow the /tag/ in the url... for instance.... blabla.com/tag/life/wikipedia.com - causing a lot of errors in Google's crawls.

Anyway, I've removed these links now and wrote it off as a bad experiment... I re-pinged all of my pages, and resubmitted my sitemap to Google earlier this week. I've noticed a couple of my pages come back into the Top 100 rankings for their keywords.. but on these select few 'lucky' pages that have found their way back, we're only talking 80th etc.. as opposed to the 3rd-4th they were previously at!

Am I missing something? Is there something else I should be doing to try and get my ranking positions back? I'm miffed!

Cheers,

Lee

You should probably just keep doing what you are doing. Also did you put http:// infront of the links because that would explain why wordpress treated them like that?

Thanks for your response. I thought I did yeh - but maybe I didn't afterall! :-s I guess I'll just keep going as I have been.... *sigh*

If it comes up as blabla.com/tag/life/wikipedia.com then it looks like you didn't post with the http://

I might be wrong though, I guess Google has penalized you for the broken links and it may take some time to shake off. Try building a link wheel or something to help you get back on your feet

Were you monitizeing the sites, do they affect your income?

Just had another look on another smaller blog I ran, and similar experience on there - some of the links weren't http:// 'ed so I think you're right. School boy error! Think I'll have to try a link wheel or something yeh - my first real experience of the Big G laying down the law, it's pretty frustrating isn't it!!

I was recieveing a very insignicant amount of money through ads, but mainly just using the project to improve my grasp of IM.

Oh well, next time I won't be making that mistake again! Cheers for pointing out the mistake anyway

Originally Posted by LeeStewie

Just had another look on another smaller blog I ran, and similar experience on there - some of the links weren't http:// 'ed so I think you're right. School boy error! Think I'll have to try a link wheel or something yeh - my first real experience of the Big G laying down the law, it's pretty frustrating isn't it!!

I was recieveing a very insignicant amount of money through ads, but mainly just using the project to improve my grasp of IM.

Oh well, next time I won't be making that mistake again! Cheers for pointing out the mistake anyway

Hey, no worries. I'm glad I could help you to figure out the problem

Maybe just because of a coming Google update. Keep checking it for changes everyday and please give us an update.

Hmm, I'd like to believe that MrPolarZero but sadly I think they're picking on me. All of my other sites that aren't hosted on thebloggeronline.com (and that I've used similar SEO techniques for) aren't having these same problems with Google.

I have been checking the SERPs every day - unfortunatley, with no positive improvements yet!

One of the problems of wordpress is it produces lots of essentially duplicate content with archives, categories, tags as well as the original post. You can tell Google not index tags, archives, authors, etc using a plugin such as All in One SEO. Alternatively uses pages for your main content - pages do not get included in cateories, archives, etc

Thanks francophile, I've done exactly that and made those particular sections not indexed. Although it is all of the sites on my domain that have been affected by this problem - perhaps making these changes might point Google into the right direction and see there's been some ammendments to things they may consider to not be the best practice. Let's see what happens

Hmm, just had another thought... I recently upgraded my SocialMonkee account to Preimum status (and more recently Elite). With that in mind.. perhaps starting to add 100 backlinks to each of my blogs a few days after publishing is hampering things? Even so, with the Premuim I've spread these out over 14 days... similar with Elite for 30 days, so I can't imagine that being the true cause?

Originally Posted by LeeStewie

Hmm, just had another thought... I recently upgraded my SocialMonkee account to Preimum status (and more recently Elite). With that in mind.. perhaps starting to add 100 backlinks to each of my blogs a few days after publishing is hampering things? Even so, with the Premuim I've spread these out over 14 days... similar with Elite for 30 days, so I can't imagine that being the true cause?

I doubt that, they do make sure they drip feed Social Bookmarks. I think you have just been penalized and you will just have to keep working and it will wear off

It is true that all of the algorithms of search engines no one knows, what we can do is we can do white hat seo from best of our knowledge and one day our ranking would be good...

excuse me, let me come watch this thread. because my blog is also about having the same problem

Originally Posted by barbarosa

excuse me, let me come watch this thread. because my blog is also about having the same problem

What happened to yours?

I know this was an old thread.. but just to update you - today I have seen my SERPs return to what they were previously (if not slightly better) and an influx of organic searches which is great!

It's the 16th May today... so I imagine the penalty Google placed on my site was 60 days - although I'm still unfamiliar with the exact reason for it! Anyhow... if you're experiencing a similar problem, at least there's light at the end of the (60 day) tunnel!

So you solved the first link problem, right? If it happens again and it wasn't user error, it's probably a .htaccess problem with seo url rewriting. As for the penalty, it may be that gbot came and found all the broken links on all the pages in your blog, so it dung you. Regarding socialmonkee, even if your don't drip feed, those links won't all get indexed at the same time. Some of those links won't get indexed in a long time or at all (even putting them in backlinksindexer couldn't get some of those links index, in my experience). Also, I've noticed that some of the socialmonkee sites aren't even indexed anymore (ie, have been banned/dropped from G).

Looks like everything is okay now, so that's good!

probably should use "no follow" on these links;
from what i heard is better to use no follow than let crawlers get stuck in tons of crap, probably google realized this is resource consuming and trying to change to quality - their mistake in first place

I have same problems with you Lee. I add some extra links to bigger sites and yes it drops my site ranking. Fortunately, i see this earlier, so then i remove all the links. And for about one month later, it back in the page 1 again. All I have to do was just re-pinging all pages in my sites three times a week.