Oh no! Lost my rankings!

**best.hands** · 28 September 2010, 6:13 am

The title is quite catchy right? Have you been into a scenario where in you struggle to think hard about what could possibly had happen why your rankings for major keywords went invisible from first page of SERP to somewhere 6 pages deeper?

You might be cursing SEs then especially Google for not doing you a favor on your seemingly effective SEO strategy.

Relax! Your site is probably not banned if you can still see it ranking for the keyword few pages deeper. Your site isn't probably hacked by someone and injected whatever malwares making SEs raise a red flag if you've reside it on the most secured server. You probably have done nothing but constantly build enough backlinks each and everyday to maintain your site's position. And you possibly read and absorbed all of the information shared by SEOmoz community and bought the most expensive yet comprehensive and effective link baiting formula guide ebooks available to one up your competition.

But what's wrong then? Perhaps backlinks inventory could help you spot the not. That is, links that are once followed and then suddenly turned not followed. And most possibly, this activity could help you monitor once live now dead links.

Backlinks are weighed more heavily than any onpage optimization effort. This fact has been the strongest rebuttal to any argument correlated to gaining top rankings. Thus, your site's way up to the first page rely on the stability of the backlinks you put behind pushing it forward. So to speak, losing them along the way could halt your site's progress to the top. Even worse, could make it hit the same position where it started.

Things to consider:
- Site owners of sites where you've drop your link might have decided to turn every outbound links from their sites nofollow.
- Sites where you've drop your links might have turned inactive.
- Sites where you've drop your links take new ownerships and reinvented.
- Sites where you've drop your links deleted your links.

So before you doubt your SEO competence, blame someone hacking in, want to do any blackhat practices your competitions are doing and curse SEs for not doing you a favor of your hardest white hat link building efforts, check first if you've landed your backlinks robustly in a way that it stays there as long as your site exists. And take prompt actions once spotted many of your backlinks are deleted.

Cheers everyone!

**Simmo!** · 28 September 2010, 6:22 am

I would certainly agree that backlinks are important and should be something that are checked in this situation. However I would add two things:

Firstly, a drop the way you describe is more likely to be a penalty IMO. If the drop was a few positions then links are a prime suspect but 6 pages indicates a penalty to me.

Secondly, the gap between the importance of off-page and on-page algo factors seems to me to be forever drawing closer. While links are important, always have been and will continue to play a role, common sense says that Google will be trying to reduce the impact that any ranking factor which can be manipulated by the webmaster has on SERPS.

**livecasino** · 28 September 2010, 2:30 pm

Bummber Best hands. Keep us posted. We/I could learn something from this experience.
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**shuvo** · 21 October 2010, 9:34 pm

Thanks for sharing this actually you must have to continue your backlink building campaign if you want to keep your position steady.

**best.hands** · 23 October 2010, 12:29 am

Originally Posted by shuvo

Thanks for sharing this actually you must have to continue your backlink building campaign if you want to keep your position steady.

Yes, that's a sure thing. But you need to keep tracking where you are dropping links. 'cause even if you always build backlinks, when all of those you built were deleted the next day, still you are not building links effectively to maintain your position on SERP. In my opinion, it is better to constantly add at least 1 link a day to each of your site's pages than build a bunch that will be dead along the way.

@simmo! Thanks for adding your opinion here.

but, on first, penalty for me is when your site totally lost its ranking and not coming back, even worse deindexed. A 6 pages deeper drop could be a cause by several factors but not penalty, imo. Such factors would can be, quality backlinks made by the competition to one up you, the reasons mentioned above, and google's primary and secondary bots keep on pushing new things on the serp. And on the second point, I have nothing to say but agree as it could really happen.

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Oh no! Lost my rankings!

keep us posted

Nice addition guys.

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