Link Bait Killed my site?

[Banana Man]

Hi,

I have a site that is just up and running about 8 months now. Everything was going ok, but its a regional site so was only getting between 50 - 100 unique visits per day. About a month ago i add an article i found on another site and linked to the source. This article got lots of interest on forums and ended up getting over 100 links (mostly forums but some big websites) and was getting about 15,000 unique hits per day.

Ever since then my site is doing very poorly. If i do not count the hits for this page my site is getting barely 10 hits per day with out about 5 hits from google. Has anyone else every noticed something like this? I have also added new articles on my homepage which havent been indexed in nearly a month even though google has been on the homepage about twice a week.

One theory i have is that its got nothing to do with the link bait article. I recently changed the titles of all the articles on the site, nothing major, i just removed the name of my site from the titles and just have the article title so that they would be more focused on the articles topics i.e. i changed "yoga meditation - alternative health ireland" to "yoga meditation". Could this be causing a temporary drop in serps?

I have been checking some of the search terms that i have been monitoring and they do now seem to have been affected at all so i presume it is the smaller search terms that have stopped ranking.

Thanks

[deny]

Start to examine most searched keywords terms related to thematic from your website and then build links. Link building is one of most import Off-site factor when it comes to SERP.
Another reason can be that you still in some kind of sandbox (8 months).
But start to working on link building and you will see results for sure.

[JJMcClure]

Originally Posted by deny

Start to examine most searched keywords terms related to thematic from your website and then build links. Link building is one of most import Off-site factor when it comes to SERP.
Another reason can be that you still in some kind of sandbox (8 months).
But start to working on link building and you will see results for sure.

He can't be sandboxed because he was getting more traffic before the link baiting exercise.

He wants to know what's changed.

Without knowing anything about that traffic, other than that he added the keyword to the title which should have improved his relevance, it's a bit difficult to suggest anything though.

[petertdavis]

It's probably not speed linking, 100 links isn't enough to trigger that. I'd look more at the title tags, removing the site name from the title does make your titles look overly optimized. Generally, you don't want to make everything exactly your keyword phrase, try to mix it up a bit instead of just having your single keyword in the title have a couple of secondary keywords as well as your site name.

[JJMcClure]

Originally Posted by petertdavis

I'd look more at the title tags, removing the site name from the title does make your titles look overly optimized.

Interesting, can you define "overly optimized"? Would you include keyword density in that term?

I think that you can be penalised for over-optimising and pushing your keyword density past a naturally occurring limit when combined with keyword placement , I just didn't think that it could happen purely from adding one instance of the the keyword to the title.

[Banana Man]

I figured out the problem!!

When i was getting all the hits to the link bait for a few weeks i couldnt assess how my site was doing in general because there was so much noise in my stats. A few days ago i took the stat counters off the link bait pages but i made a boo boo. I wrote the cms myself and when i changed the stats code the way the site is setup it was working on parts of the site but not on others. I had a feeling the hits were down before i removed the stat code so didnt look into it too much when i saw they were down.

Had it back up and running for a few hours now and seems to be as it should be so panic over!!

I got a bit worried about it because i recently read an article on seo book saying that google now has filters for sites it thinks is using link baite to get links. If it see's a spike in links and it is then not backed up on a regular basis it will discount a lot of the link equity you would have got from all the links. Thought it would be strange though if this was causing a drop in hits as he didnt mention anything about google penalizing sites for it but i did take the article from another site so i thought they might be doing it on account of duplicate content even though i had linked to the source.

About the titles, i hear what you are saying about looking overly optimized. Google wants to have the best fitting page at the top of their search results not the best optimized but its a fine line. Hard to know how to play it exactly.

The cms is setup so that the url's and page titles are automatically created from the h1 titles of the articles but i had also added the site name after it. Now i just have the h1 title. I dont know if this will look overly optimized but its hard when you have a cms doing the work.

[stymiee]

Originally Posted by Banana Man

I got a bit worried about it because i recently read an article on seo book saying that google now has filters for sites it thinks is using link baite to get links.

That's a load of crap. They may get suspicious of large influxes of incoming links in a short period of time but they don't judge content by whether it looks like link bait or not.

Yet another example of ... nevermind....

[rcj662]

When you changed titles it could have changed the search terms they are listed for.

[JJMcClure]

Originally Posted by stymiee

That's a load of crap. They may get suspicious of large influxes of incoming links in a short period of time but they don't judge content by whether it looks like link bait or not.

Yet another example of ... nevermind....

How do you know that?

For me and many other people on this forum it's yet another example of being told one thing whilst someone else is telling me another ... and neither is explaining how they actually know that ........ and you wonder why people fixate on the tangibles.

[petertdavis]

Originally Posted by JJMcClure

How do you know that?

For me and many other people on this forum it's yet another example of being told one thing whilst someone else is telling me another ... and neither is explaining how they actually know that ........ and you wonder why people fixate on the tangibles.

That's because they're all making it up. The only guys who know for real aren't talking.

[stymiee]

Originally Posted by JJMcClure

How do you know that?

How can a search engine tell content is link bait? For that matter, isn't all good content link bait? If content is that good shouldn't it get a bunch of links? Isn't that how the system is designed? Claiming that writing good content is a bad thing is ridiculous.

[JJMcClure]

Originally Posted by stymiee

How can a search engine tell content is link bait? For that matter, isn't all good content link bait? If content is that good shouldn't it get a bunch of links? Isn't that how the system is designed? Claiming that writing good content is a bad thing is ridiculous.

No one claimed writing good content is a bad thing, I certainly didn't. Nor did I imply it, it was entirely unnecessary for you to say that or even create the possibility of it just to reinforce your point, I simply asked for an explanation.

[stymiee]

Originally Posted by JJMcClure

No one claimed writing good content is a bad thing, I certainly didn't. Nor did I imply it, it was entirely unnecessary for you to say that or even create the possibility of it just to reinforce your point, I simply asked for an explanation.

I was referring to what that bogus SEO Book said.

[Banana Man]

It doesnt say that link bait is bad it just says that it might have been devalued by google. Here's the Link Bait article.

[JJMcClure]

Originally Posted by stymiee

I was referring to what that bogus SEO Book said.

Ah... I thought you were being dramatic, I apologise.

[stymiee]

Originally Posted by JJMcClure

Ah... I thought you were being dramatic, I apologise.

I'm too old for drama.

Originally Posted by Banana Man

It doesnt say that link bait is bad it just says that it might have been devalued by google. Here's the Link Bait article.

Devaluing it is basically saying it isn't good.

[Flavorful]

Is it possible that you made someone mad? There are Black-hat methods for reducing someone's SERP rankings.

[JJMcClure]

Originally Posted by Flavorful

Is it possible that you made someone mad? There are Black-hat methods for reducing someone's SERP rankings.

Tell us about the ones you know..?

[stymiee]

Originally Posted by Flavorful

Is it possible that you made someone mad? There are Black-hat methods for reducing someone's SERP rankings.

No there's not.

[fatnewt]

I see contradiction lives on in the SEO forum.

[stymiee]

Originally Posted by fatnewt

I see contradiction lives on in the SEO forum.

It's a fundamental part of SEO.

[JJMcClure]

Originally Posted by stymiee

It's a fundamental part of SEO.

No kidding, from now on, no is allowed to discuss sex, religion, politics or SEO at any of my parties.