I guess it was only a matter of time but I really wished and even started to think it won’t happen to me. But turns out that it did. On February 21st I lost quite a few of my top ranked Google positions and most of my reviews have dropped in rankings significantly. It really sucks but I promised myself not to take it too hard and not let it depress me in any way.
So far so good 
When it happened I didn’t really knew why and what was the main reason. I had some ideas but they turned out to be wrong so no need to mention them. This is also the reason it took me about a week to get this post out there. I really wanted to get a better understanding as to what happened, both for me and for you.
So What Happened?
It seems that Google has finally targeted the networks that provide homepage backlinks services (HPBL) and they simply de-indexed tons of sites and blogs across the internet which was the cause for major ranking drops in all the sites that were using these services and were being linked to on the sites that got de-indexed.
You can read more about this issue on the following threads on the Traffic Planet forum:
- Does Google Penalize Your Site If Your Link Network Gets Deindexed
- Thoughts Feedback on Googles Recent Slapping/Algo Change
Here is also an interesting video from Terry Kyle about this recent Google update. Terry had one of the most famous and popular homepage backlinks services that was closed a while back so he knows a thing or two about operating such networks.
The problem is that I didn’t use these type of services on my blog so that didn’t make much sense to me unless you also include private blog networks being de-indexed, networks such as BuildMyRank which I did use quite a bit on all of the pages that got hit on my blog. So I did a little more research and found this thread:
It seems that other BMR users have noticed the same kind of drops in rankings. I asked the guys over at BMR about this and they didn’t confirm any major de-indexing across their network but when you think about it, why would they confirm that?
I decided to check this myself as BMR has an option for you to find where your posts have been published on. I asked my VA to go over all of the posts I have in BMR and grab all the URLs it could find where my posts have been published. I ended up with a list of 729 URLs on 682 unique domains.
I checked the index rate of the 682 unique domains suing Scrapebox and all of them are indexed:
Must admit I didn’t expect such results. 100% index rate is pretty amazing and I have been posting to this network for the past 6 months or so. I also took the 729 page URLs where the actual posts are located on and run them to check the index rate and here are the results:
A 98.3% index rate. From these results it doesn’t really look like BMR was targeted by Google or penalized. If that was the case than I should have seen a much much lower index rates. I assume that the 682 blogs I checked are only a small part of the entire BMR network so the fact that they are all OK and indexed doesn’t mean that BMR wasn’t affected in any way. I simply can’t say anything for sure and i’m providing you with all the information I have.
Must admit that when I read the forum thread about BMR I kind of already made up my mind that BMR was responsible for my loss of rankings. I am more than happy that I didn’t take what I read for granted and actually took the time to check this out myself. Turns out BMR has nothing to do with my loss of rankings and I just want to emphasize that you shouldn’t take anything you read in such forums for granted. Test things out for yourself and see what is true and what isn’t. There is so much miss information out there that you really need to learn not to take as the cold hard truth. People have opinions about everything and today it is very easy to share them with others thanks to the internet but only few really take the time to test what they say and validate if it is indeed true or not.
Google Confirms Panda 3.3
It took a while but Google finally confirmed a new Panda update along with 40 search quality updates that took place in February. This is mainly what I was waiting for and the reason I delayed publishing this post. I simply waited to get some kind of confimation that Google indeed made some changes to their search algorithm.
I’m not even going to try and explain what all these changes mean (mostly because I don’t know) but there seems to be one major change Google announced that will take most of the attention. Among those 40 search quality changes, Google says the following:
Panda update. This launch refreshes data in the Panda system, making it more accurate and more sensitive to recent changes on the web.
This doesn’t really say much except to confirm that Google keeps on updating Panda which was first launched a year ago, on February 2011 and caused a huge stir in the search engine optimization world. If you are not very familiar with Google Panda and all of its updates across the last year than you should check out The Google Panda Update, One Year Later infographic.
Here is the one major change I mentioned. It has to do with link evaluation and here is what Google has to say about it:
Link evaluation. We often use characteristics of links to help us figure out the topic of a linked page. We have changed the way in which we evaluate links; in particular, we are turning off a method of link analysis that we used for several years. We often rearchitect or turn off parts of our scoring in order to keep our system maintainable, clean and understandable.
What did they turn off?
That is the main question and Google will not be providing any clearer answers. You can bet that every one that are doing SEO are asking themselves what is this signal that was turned off and what does it mean for the future of link building. From what I was able to read online it seems most people are putting their money on anchor text being the signal that was tuned off.
I don’t really know if that is true or not (no one does) but if it is true, than how will Google rank pages now? Based on what factors? It seems to me that anchor text is just too important of a factor when it comes to determining which pages should rank for specific keywords.
I guess only time and testing will tell exactly what happened and what has changed.
How Was my Blog Affected?
As some of you already noticed and mentioned in various comments over the past week, most of my reviews are no longer ranking where they used to rank. Some of my reviews dropped to the bottom of page one, others to pages 2 and 3 and one also dropped all the way to page 8. It varies across all of my top reviews and of course that translates into loss of traffic and income.
How big of an impact it made I don’t yet know since it has only been a week but I’m sure I’ll get the big picture over the next few weeks and I will be able to better understand the scope of losing these rankings.
Got be honest with you. It really sucks 
It also came in a pretty bad timing as it seemed my blog was doing better than ever and was breaking traffic and income records just before I got hit. Maybe someone from Google visited my blog and read my Lets Get Personal, My Real Name Is Not Dave post in which I said that I plan to rebrand the blog and move it to a new domain but I’m not doing it yet because I don’t know how it will effect my rankings, and he decided to help me out and make the decision to move to the new domain much easier 
.
Is It a Penalty or Not?
This is a question I don’t really know the answer to yet. I’m not sure if my blog got penalized or if I just lost the rankings because many of the links that helped me gain them simply got de-indexed which will obviously result in a loss of traffic.
My blog didn’t get de-indexed and I still have pages that are ranking just as they did before. From what I read in the tread I mentioned above it seems that some say it is a penalty and others say it isn’t. There is no clear answer and even though my blog didn’t get de-indexed doesn’t mean it wasn’t penalized as you can clearly understand from the following statement that was made by Matt Cutts from Google:
In the rare cases in which Google perceives that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved. As a result, the ranking of the site may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in which case it will no longer appear in search results.
Focus on the parts I highlighted and never mind that he talks about duplicate content in this case. It just goes to show that Google can penalize sites by dropping their rankings and not just by de-indexing them.
I guess the only way to get a clear answer is to try and get the rankings I lost back by building links and promoting those pages, and that is what I’m going to do. You can be sure that I will share the results with you once I will get some information and hopefully it will be good news .
What Did I Learn?
It has only been a week and the entire picture is not clear yet but I know that there are plenty to learn from what happened and that is what I’m planning to do. There is good in what happened and it might take me a while to figure what it was but I know I will do my best to figure it out and learn from this experience.
With that said, I did manage to learn a few things that I want to share with you:
SEO Is Risky
SEO is a risky business and it is constantly changing. The methods that work today might not work tomorrow and might actually hurt you tomorrow. Keep in mind that in the eyes of Google, any link building method is not legit unless the links are being built naturally by people coming to your site, liking the content and simply sharing it out of their own free will.
Anchor Text Diversity
I don’t know if low anchor text diversity has anything to do with the recent Google update (but I feel it does), and I’m not sure there is a way to know that for sure but I can tell you that I didn’t really diversify the anchor texts I used when promoting my reviews on this blog. I only started doing so recently so that is also something I learned and that I will implement from now on with all my link building.
Aside from the actual keywords I will target, I will also use the following as anchor texts:
- Click here
- The root domain
- The full URL
- General keywords that I will use to promote the home page
- Any other general keywords you might think of
Don’t Use Homepage Backlinks Services
Even though I didn’t use these services, I don’t see me using them now as it seems clear that Google targeted these type of blogs and networks according to all the chatter on the traffic planet forum. If you are still thinking of using such services than I recommend you watch the video from Terry Kyle as he mentions what type of network will be safer than others to use.
Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket
Relying on just one site is not smart in my opinion. This blog provides me with most of my income and as long as it was OK and my rankings were high everything really looked great. But I learned what many others have learned online over the years, that things can change in a split second.
I have no doubt that my income will take a hit due to the rankings drop I experienced but I’m happy to say that I already decided a few months ago to focus on creating additional income sources that are not related to this blog so that I won’t depend on it too much.
Pat Flynn had a very interesting post about this issue. He asked his readers What’s Better: Having 1 Site or 10 Sites? which turned out to be one of the most popular posts on his blog and I think you can learn a lot from the various comments and thoughts his readers shared.
Traffic Is Not Just Google
The same way relying on just one site isn’t smart, I also think that relying only on Google as the main traffic source is not a smart thing to do. There are plenty of other traffic sources out there that I should be using and I planning to focus on that alongside the traffic I get from Google.
The other traffic sources I can think of are:
- Building an email list
- Increasing your RSS subscribers
- Social Sites, mainly Twitter and Facebook
- YouTube
My big brother has what is probably the biggest architectural visualization blog online and Google isn’t among his top 10 traffic sources which just goes to show that you can build a very big and successful blog without focusing only on SEO and traffic from Google.
Your Turn
Did you notice any ranking changes over the past few days? Did any of your sites got hit? Do you have any ideas on why that happened and what has changed after the last Google update?
Please share your thoughts by commenting below. I’m sure we can all learn from each others experiences so don’t be a stranger.
Thanks.
To your success (and mine 
),
{ 57 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m sorry to here this mate! Sounds pretty bad! I was just about to sign up for bmr (I’ve heard good reviews) however will not now!
What is counted as “homepage backlinks services”? Is BMR one of these? Never heard of them!
I’ve seen no drops in rankings! I use diverse anchors though so maybe that has helped!
Do you think this algo update has taken effect now (100%) not rolling out gradually?
Hi John, I don’t think BMR should be counted as a high PR homepage backlinks type of service and i’m not sure they are to blame for any loss of rankings as I mentioned.
I don’t really know how the update works. I do know that it already made an impact of the past week or two but I also think it will keep on rolling out gradually.
Hey Dror
It sucks that you lost a few of your top rankings but (just like you said) don’t take it too hard. Keep posting and I am sure it will get back because this is in my opinion the best internet marketing blog there is and I think it won’t take long for Google to realize that too.
Sorry for my poor English,
Keep up the good work,
OM
Hi Om, thanks for the kind words but unfortunately, Google don’t really know which content is good or which sites are good and valuable for their visitors. I also don’t see them being able to figure out “good” content in the coming years since how can you program a robot or an algorithm to read (scan) a piece of content and determine if it is good or not? Based on what factors?
In any case, I will keep doing what i’m doing and change what needs to be changed in hope that I will bounce back sooner or later
Thanks for the fast reply Dror! A few month’s ago I read an article where somebody said that Google also rates your site on the time people stay on your site. I can’t find the article at the moment, I am sorry. But if your content is interesting people will stay longer on your site and your ranks get better.
Anyway, dont listen to much to me lol I am still learling. Keep doing what you’re doing and I am sure the ranks will be back!
Bounce rate is a known factor and I also think it is a very good indicator for quality of content or for how relent it is according to the search phrase one searched for but it doesn’t fit all type of sites.
I’ve been reading the same things about BMR being a possible culprit. Of course, there’s no way to know for sure.
Do you have any posts that were promoted with second-tier links fed by BMR but not linked to directly from BMR posts? I wonder if there would be any difference in the impact to those more insulated pages.
Hi John, I didn’t promote 1st or 2nd tier sites with BMR so I don’t really know if that makes a difference.
I’m probably on the conservative side when it comes to link building. I don’t like direct linking for this reason–and I can’t afford to have a client’s site drop because I wasn’t careful.
Nice take on the latest updates Dror.
I soon figured with affiliate marketing that its better to have a few sites than focus on one great one. I learnt the hard way when one of my sites mysterially developed intermitant high and low rankings. Im talking high and the extremes of low. One week I can get a top number 1 position for and the following 2 weeks it wont show in top 100! Been like that for last 5 months or so. Never figured it, varying anchor texts and stuff and still does the same. Not just one keyword, quite a few too!
Will see how I get on!
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I noticed this as well and I use BMR as a prime source of my links but I do not diversify the anchor text which may explain what has happened.
Surprised to see bmr index rate but we can’t assume they are not at fault. In fact, we now have to assume those type of links have been devalued. This is assuming you didn’t trigger any anchor density filter. Also, I think seolinkmonster is also the culprit. Think about link relevancy and how seolinkmonster offers no categories.
This is what my data set is telling me. Obviously its still early.
Hi Bo, the main thing is with any Google update and rankings drop is that we can’t know for sure what caused it. It is pretty much a guessing game.
About SEO Link Monster, it seems that many of the domains on that network have been de-indexed and out of the 93 domains I had in my case study not one is indexed anymore (and the index rate was 88.49% 3 weeks ago). I will be posting an update on SEO Link Monster in which I will share all of the new information I found.
I really appreciate posts like this, but I wonder about this conclusion, “Turns out BMR has nothing to do with my loss of rankings.”
I understand why you said that, and I hope you’re right, but I’m with Bo–we can’t assume BMR doesn’t play a role.
When something like this happens, there are a few possible explanations:
1. Algo update (we know this happened, maybe the algo alone is responsible)
2. Blog network deindexed, meaning links evaporate and your incoming link juice goes away (you checked for this and the network wasn’t deindexed)
3. Blog network detected, not deindexed, but deemed a “bad neighborhood” or “link scheme” or even just “low quality” and linked sites suffer a penalty or have links devalued
All we can know for sure is that #2 didn’t happen (thanks to you for checking your BMR posts). We don’t know that #3 didn’t happen, and that’s why your conclusion is flawed.
Let’s say I’m Google. I don’t like link building schemes (like BMR or a lot of the other tools we SEOs use). I see a lot of links pointing to your site, so I dig a bit. Hmmm, looks like a lot of those links came from short articles on blogs that are updated very frequently. Interesting. All of the posts on these blogs have about 150 words and one outbound link per 150 words. It’s not duplicate content, but it’s not great content either.
The blogs linking in to you from BMR look like a link scheme because almost everything about those blogs is the same: very short posts with outbound links, posted several times a day, usually all text, very little rich media. That’s the bad part about sharing a network (even a good one like BMR) is that so many people will do the minimum, and that creates a blueprint which can be detected.
Let’s just pretend for a minute that Google detected the sites in BMR’s network. So, what am I (Google) to do? I’ve got some options.
1. I could look at the charactaristics of BMR’s network and fine-tune the algo to devalue those links.
2. I could deindex all the blogs in BMR.
3. I could punish the sites being linked to from BMR.
You concluded that BMR wasn’t responsible for your rankings drop because the URLs in BMR are still indexed. So, #2 didn’t happen. It could be that an algo update devalued links from “thin” content (like BMR content). Or it could be that you’ve received a penalty. Are you using Webmaster Tools? Some people are getting notifications of inorganic linking.
Cheers.
Hi John,
Thanks for your great comment and great insight. I can’t agree with you more and for this reason I edited the post so it would better reflect what I found and that I can’t really get a clear answer from that.
I do use Google Webmaster Tools and I didn’t get any notice but I also heard that many others did get those type of messages.
Thank you Dror for this update. I have re-checked my sites and all are still ok. Not losing ranking. I only use ALN for build links. Can’t say that ALN isn’t affected but ALN works and works well now
. I will keep using ALN
Tung Tran recently posted..Is Your Blogging Ready to Stand the Test of Time?
Hi Tung, using only one method or link building service isn’t the best approach. I recommend you start using other methods along with ALN.
Yes I will
. I’m just testing each service for a period of time and see how it works then move to other service. I have used BMR for months as well.
Tung Tran recently posted..Is Your Blogging Ready to Stand the Test of Time?
Hey Dror, Welcome to Google hell! I think you have been very fortunate that this is the first time this has happened to you. I have 15 sites that bounce between being in the top 5 for my targeted keywords to dropping to sometimes below 800 (gasp!), then eventually back up again. I’ve followed you for a while and don’t do anything wildly different than you do for SEO and have a similar approach and philosophy towards internet marketing. Sucks, doesn’t it?
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Read your post and felt your pain m8! One of my client sites and one of my personal blogs were hit bad -500 penalty across the board. Like you, I initially blamed BMR but I’m finding the same as you – most of the domains are still indexed and Spyglass shows the links present so I’m starting to look more closely at on-page factors and anchor diversity. I use several other networks like UAW and Traffic Kaboom with good results up till now but the checking process will take me a couple of days to complete.
One thing is for sure, the need to diversify your links and IMO build out your own private network have never been greater. I’ll keep checking back to this for others feedback – good luck with your rankings – even if are competing against me
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Thanks for the info David and keep us posted about the results once you complete your checking process.
A site which i had a couple of number one rankings for ( highly and moderate competitive terms), recently dropped 4-5 pages in the SERPs. The site does not appear to be banned and I do not know why.
I have just found this article, and checked the BMR posts which was one of the strategies, i noticed two things.
1. Many BMR posts that were indexed are no longer indexed.
2. The BMR sites have removed the category list from all the pages (reducing Page Rank flow) on their blogs.
So I think BMR have been hit really hard.
Also when I tried to post to UAW last week they did not allow me to use the same URL or Keyword saying that people had been affected by recent updates.
Therefore I guess clients of UAW who don’t use any other network also experienced a drop and UAW found that the people who had this dropped because they used the same anchor text or URL in a post more than once.
I am still trying to figure this out, but I thought you might find this helpful and I will keep watching this space for further information.
Hi, I got the message in webmaster tools like many others, however I seemed to have gained position in SERPS for the 2 sites I got the messages for, this is really weird the latest updates seems to have affected many people in different ways, I will wait for the dust to settle before coming to any conclusions.
Dror
I’m really sorry to hear that the deranking is going to have a large negative financial impact on you. That truly sucks. It doesn’t sound like you were penalized though just lost link juice which the site can recover from. You didnt receive the kiss of (kiss off?) of death message in you google webmaster account. Which can only be good news. In my case I had so few links on the 2 sites that Google squashed that I’m really pretty sure it was related to SEO Linkmonster. I’m not blaming them of course but right now that’s how it looks. Btw I was using very diverse anchor text so I’m confident that wasn’t the issue.
Did your niche affiliate/Adsense sites get hit?
The core issue, as you alluded to, is that it’s crazy to invest money and a short life into a business model that is an endless game of Whack A Mole with Google doing the wacking. As you said Google considers any unnatural linking unacceptable and has made it clear (to me in writing
) that if they find links to your site that they dont like your whole site can go down, I assume forever. This is financial russian roulette. And it’s time to face that and work on alternatives. I have been kind of shocked at the number of people rationalizing this away in various forum threads I have been reading, as just another round in the back and forth battle between IM and Google. Would any one build a chain of stores if they knew that it was only a matter of time (months?, 2 years) before they started to be regularly but unpredictably blown up? If you think im exaggerating describe the role google plays in your business life to your non IM friends and see how they react. From here forward I’m focusing on Post-Google IM. Both traffic and revenue. We have amazing tools for rapidly identifying niche markets and testing and sourcing products into them that business people before us would have killed for. And most of them have little or nothing to do with Google. I look forward to your posts on traffic alternatives. Sorry for the rant 
Bob
Thanks for contributing some data jim. Another thing to consider is spun content. Moving forward I will only use spun content 100xs. That may be a bit high still.
Dror, It might be worth it to check data on all the keywords you lost and whether or not the ultraspunarticles has anything to do with it.
Most services limit articles to 300 sales but thats a lot and it might be hurting you. Just a thought.
Hi Dror,
So that’s what happened I pointed out few days back. Yeh relying on one site is something can put someone from thousands to zero. I did learn this lesson few months back when my main site got hit badly (You know that right?).
Now I have several sites with different IPs or different hosting companies and started doing good again.
You know “Google Sucks” keyword have 27,000/m broad match searches
Hope you will get back your rankings soon.
Jawad
Hi Jawad, glad to know you are doing great again and thanks for the info about “Google Sucks”. Are you ranking #1 on for that?
Hi Dror
I think you have to de-optimize a little bit your on page factors ,and start anchor text diversity.It helped me in the past.
Dave, make a new post on your site and see if it rank in the same way or not. One of my sites old posts are ranking at the same positions where they used to be one month back but in last two week I made 2 new posts and when I started giving links to them the posts started going back in serp rather moving towards first page.
Hi Jawad, that is one of the things I plan on doing
Thanks.
Hello Dror,
I don’t use BRM or SEOLM and I have lost rankings for 1 site. Not like a -50 or -100, it just seems like my last couple months of link building was wiped out.
While BMR or SEOLM may not be the problem per se…Maybe Google is just better at spotting blog networks. There are many tell tale signs as mentioned above.
Real blog posts have things like bolded subtitles, bullet lists, tags, etc…Blog networks rarely do. On real blogs, the post length is always different. Some posts will contain no outbound links, but others will contain dozens. And when people use 3 or even 2 posts to the same site in one blog submission, that seems like that would leave a huge footprint.
I don’t think it has anything to do with spinning content or overusing anchor text. I think it’s more about the patterns that these networks create, especially with lazy users.
I’m sorry to hear your rankings got hit Dror. But I’m sure you will be alright in the long term. You will get more and more loyal readers. And even if SEO ceases to exist, you will find other products to provide quality reviews on. And your readers will come back because it is so hard to get reliable information.
Hi Michael, you situation proves what i’m saying and I completely agree with you. Google made some algo changes and they are now much better at spotting these blog networks and de-indexing them or taking away from the value of the links they contain. It is true that some blog networks are leaving too big of a footprint and it seems that in order for blog networks to survive from now on they will have to avoid leaving any kind of footprints.
Relying on SEO only is not smart and I sure hope to gain more followers so I wouldn’t depend on search traffic too much but I don’t see SEO going anywhere. Pretty sure it is here to stay
Thanks.
Sorry to hear that Dror…
I have not been affected right now… but I am worried that could come soon enough!
I think what we really need to start doing is looking to create quality content on reputable sites in our niches. The reason why we are getting slapped all the time is because we are not playing google’s game. Which is building links naturally. Where are we going to learn? I am going to move away from these blog networks and invest that money into hiring a VA to contact sites in my niches and guest post for them with good content and links back to my sites.
Doing this.. along with building a quality site.. WILL ensure that my sites stay on top of the serps.
You are correct Sean. There are methods of gaining exposure and traffic than SEO and Google and focusing on them is what people should do for the bigger sites they build. But that will be very hard to do for smaller niche sites, don’t you think?
I was just thinking about hiring a full time VA to do manual Web 2.0 creation for me. These links are great once the properties age a bit and you backlink them.
And no footprint.
Hey Dror..
Yeah… It might be hard to get more links in smaller niches… but there are other ways of getting links.. such as press releases.. I am going to do one of those in the next couple of days. But guest posting is another good one. I have been told by a trusted source that guest blogging… although not as instant getting links from blog networks… is just far better. Not from a link stand point… but from a traffic and brand awareness point too.
I am going to incorporate guest posting, PR releases, a bit of social media and forum commenting on new link building campaigns from now on. I am going to ease out the blog networks we are so used to working with…
I am in this for the long haul! Building quality sites in your market with natural type of links is the way forward people. If you want to minimize rankings risk… do things ethically. Its the only way to sustain yourself in this business!
What else have you going for you that you can keep yourself afloat now man?
Cheers,
Sean
I agree with you Sean and I also think that guest blogging is the best way to build your brand, drive traffic and get truly high quality backlinks but as I said, that will only apply to authority sites you build (like this blog) but I don’t see that working for small niche sites that promote Amazon or Clickbank products.
I still got this blog, it ain’t going nowhere
and even though I lost some rankings i’m more than happy to say that i’m still getting traffic and attention. Also, I didn’t see any rankings drop in my AdSense and other niche sites so all is good 
.
Hi, I left a longish comment on your BMR page explaining why this service was a very bad idea for webmasters – basically you are generating unique content which you have no control over, it was just a matter of time before google slapped these type of sites as they were definitely working too well.
Your problem is that the BMR sites have been partially penalized, they may be indexed still but that is no reason to assume the posts are passing pagerank – dont forget that BMR is the best one out there at the moment in terms of quality so god help the rest in a few more months time.
It is a better idea to post the articles on your own website to grow it and use some other method of promotion rather than BMR – probably your own mini private blog network is the way to go and that is what I am playing with at the moment – the added benefit is you can make each site generate money to covers it’s costs – no not adsense btw.
So I am sorry to see your sites demotion, it does not sound like a direct Panda hit to me though,
Good to hear man…
BTW.. for anyone listening in… build an authority site… forget those small niche sites. They wont last I can tell you that now. You are far better off building an authority site with good content and authoritative links. Seo will become much less of an issue with you once you take that approach.
BTW… will you be using any more link networks from now on? Whats your approach going to be now?
Sean
I’m still working on figuring that out Sean. I think more time is needed to truly understand what Google changed and what is still working.
Hi Dave.
I said I would give you some feedback after a month of using SEO Linkmonster. To my dismay I have been booted from my page 2 rankings when I started for most of my keywords and phrases to now appear on pages 7 & 8.
I believe Google definitely has something to do with this and are penalizing people who use this product. I would love to hear your thoughts on this matter.
Cheers Chris
Hi Chris, I think my thoughts are well explained on my SEO Link Monster Update post
I gotcha man!
You’ll get there
Dror, thanks for a thoughtful discussion of the latest algo changes. I haven’t seen my sites affected but I don’t use BMR or HPBL services. I have long commented that BMR is not as bulletproof as some people think — BMR blogs are instantly identifiable as such (no images, for one thing).
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Hi
BMR is not at fault.
Ive just checked and in the last three months ive published around 10000 BMR posts. THE PR is great with 70% greater than PR1
Ive seen no drop in rankings across all the sites ive build BMR. But i use diverse anchor text and also other backlinking techniques at the SAME time so the CLoud Cover is pretty dense
I would however say that the indexing rate (which i suspect shows some de-ndexing) is dropping 3 months ago they achieved around 100% but now its nearer 92%.
One factor could be that if you only have say 10 BMR posts to a site and they form the majority of the PR inflow to your site you could ahve lost ranking.
Im sure Dror thats not the case.
regads
I agree Steve, it doesn’t really seem like BMR is at fault or any other specific blog network for that matter. I think it is more of a global change that Google made.
10,000 posts in 3 months! WOW…
Hey Dror,
I am really sorry to hear about the loss in rankings. I myself have noticed some loss in rankings on most of my niche sites. I also notice a loss in pr as well. On the contrary, websites I haven’t promoted in a long time moved up in rankings. SO its really hard to say exactly what factor is causing the loss/gain in rankings. I will have to do some test and I will let you know what’s up so you can share with your readers.
For now, just want to wish you all the best with everything.
….
Casey Gentles
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Thanks man!
So, I’ve been following the so called “rules” of SEO and getting my butt kicked….
I’ve been analyzing my competition the last few days. Based on what I’ve seen, I don’t think article marketing is dead (it seems to be a matter of where your articles call home and not where I thought it would be). One competitor is still in position 1 with a mix of articles (on crappy non ranked sites) and blog comments. Their site has backlinks on many unique IP’s – much more than I. Even though I have more links (and better quality to boot), their IP diversity seems to be the difference. So, more IP diversity should help me rank higher?
Another competitor (different site), for a very competitive keyword, is shelling out 10K links per month (their site is only 4 months old) and they rank 4th (up from 8th – 4 weeks ago) in Google. Compare this to my site that is 10 years old and I only build 2k links per month (using Article Ranks, manual/custom blog comments and thousands of natural links over the years) and stuck on page 2. In the past month, my sites have dropped and the competition has risen. I’ve used SEO Spyglass to analyze their backlinks. The difference seems to be; their using non-spun (re-using them on multiple sites too), un-readable articles on low quality sites with no PR. I’m using USA mini’s and writing/spinning my own MTUSP’s for my links and articles are 900+ percent unique (per AR). Plus unique, quality and readable written articles by yours truly are part of my SEO campaign.
So, Google seems to be targeting the so called SEO blog networks; AR, BMR, etc.. and you may or may not be affected based on your back linking diversity. My competition doesn’t seem to be using these services, based on the low quality of sites their articles (and again, their article submissions are unreadable) call home. I find this ironic since Google prefers quality. I guess it’s o.k. to submit crappy articles if your not using a so called “blog network”.
Re-thinking my SEO strategy.
Guys BMR has closed down as Google has deindexed most of the sites. PLease read there message:
Unfortunately, this morning, our scripts and manual checks have determined that the overwhelming majority of our network has been de-indexed (by Google), as of March 19, 2012. In our wildest dreams, there’s no way we could have imagined this happening.
I never used BMR. However, I have used Article Ranks extensively with USA mini’s. Received a warning (March 3rd) in GWT that my link building is un-natural. So, what now? My sites are still ranking on page 1 for most keywords. Wondering if my sites are going to be penalized more or de-indexed for these “un-natural” links?
Hi Chris, I read somewhere that this is a scare tactic used by Google to find out all the blogs they should de-indexed because they are part of a blog network. They send out that warning message that you see in GWT and when someone answers and tells them that he was only using service X and/or Y, than Google knows to de-indexed the link profile for that site. Don’t know if that is the case but it does make sense. In any case, if you are still ranking #1 than good for you and I would recommend you stop directing links from blog networks directly to your site, point them to buffer sites (web 2.0 properties, article directories and such).
With the BMR debacle we now have proof that Google has declared war on blog networks. One thing to keep in mind is how easy it is for them to identify and squash any publicly advertised network. All they have to do is join them and “watch”. The resources they need to spend on this are minuscule. Obviously they will do this in order of public comments on the networks effectiveness. So one of the first ones to go down is BMR. Which was by BMRs own admission WIPED OUT! I think a useful way going forward to use blog networks is to build them privately under the radar as small cooperatives of IMers that use them for a fairly small number of themed sites with original content. This way you are building a long term shared asset of quality sites. I don’t know enough about the numbers of sites you would need to actually make an appreciable difference in the rankings of the sites you are using the network for. There are probably rule of thumb formulas for this out there that people have worked out.
Bob
Hi Bob, creating private blog networks does seem to be one of the best answers but I also heard of such networks being hit. I don’t think its an easy or cheap to build such networks and the most important part is how to keep them safe and truly under the radar (if that is even possible). There is not doubt that Google has made a big impact over the past month and it would be great to see how things will work from now on. I always like to wait a while after big Google changes since you can see things more clearly after the “panic” ends and the dust settles.
hi i am just a guy with a single web-site to try promote my business within my financial scope.Competing with the large companies has been difficult to say the least, but i made one mistake i decided to join linkmonster i have now lost most of my rankings and most of my key words, What now?? are links from directories still ok ?? i love to blog and will continue to do so, but what next eric roberts
Hi Eric, sorry to hear that.
First thing, I would recommend you build more sites and not rely on only one site. Did you site go de-indexed or just lost its rankings?
Second thing, just keep testing to see what works. It is a bit of a problem to test if you only have one site (especially if it got hurt already) but I really don’t see any other way.