SERP Question
 

Hi,

I have a blog that ranked on the first page for a specific keyword. My site moved from 2dn to 4th spot from day to day, getting me a couple of sales a week.

Lately I started getting more and more backlinks using the specific keywords as an anchor and I have seen a huge drop in SERP. it went from 2nd position to not even beeing on the first 3 pages

What gives??

blog is on it's own domain, about 6 months old, handwritten and updated monthly.


any suggestions ?

rotate anchors i hope?

plus site is young fluctuations are natural. keep link building.

also prune any dead or questionable outbound links.

did you put any big flash or java near the top recently?

There's honestly way too much that COULD go wrong to give one solid answer.

I would personally track everything that I did to that blog, and back track...i.e. "bought links from XYZ on March 15th 2010".

You should then be able to build a timeline of what you did to try to improve SERPs vs. your realistic SERPs. Something went wrong.

No, did not change anything

How many anchors you suggest I use?

Thing is, it got good SERP after I submitted it to around 20 blog directories.

Then after a couple of months of trading and building backlinks, it started loosing its ranking. (actually started losing ranking around 2-3 weeks ago)

using just one anchor sometimes triggers a penalty.

i recommend looking at the results for some big adult searches, take those sites and use some tools to study the anchors they are using. it will give you a good idea on how many plus the percentages that work.

your sites look clean. i just think it's a normal fluctuation. just keep building links it should bounce back stronger.

If your linked from blog directories, your site will slowly get placed further and further back in the directory. Your links will start benefiting them with nothing in return. They give great results at first, but weeks to months in you'll get none.

That is most likely what happened as your link juice was turned lower and lower.

For the anchor, keep the same "main" keyword and vary the usage. For a website of mine focusing on seo for adult sites I used "adult seo", "seo for adult sites", "adult website seo", etc. This approach got me in the top 10 for all my wanted terms including adult seo.

Sounds great, will give this a try

True that...I've witnessed that myself on sites where my main linkbuilding efforts were directories.

sounds very much like Google penalized you for something. Google is a communist when it comes to penalizing sites for no good reason. It's their way or the highway :(

blog directories get new submissions and your position on them drops. thus you lose your link juice. Try adding one new inbound week. dont over do it just be consistent.