Before you read on I must highlight that this post isn’t a dig and is ment with the utmost respect (it actually follows a post on Tim’s excellent blog).
Tim’s is a tale of woe. Once riding high for highly competitive SEO focused keywords through years of trying almost every link building technique known to man, Tim’s site came under scrutiny from the SEO community and he thought… damned, I should clean up my back link profile to avoid any bad press… and rightly so of one of SEO’s rising stars.
It’s not hard to guess what happened next, Tim’s rankings disappeared. Many thought he’d incurred a penalty but the truth was far less sinister.
There’s no real moral to this tale, just the warning that no matter how grey your back link profile, if it works, think hard and long before you make any commercially threatening actions… and that I don’t know of a top ranking domain that has snowy while back links… usually inherited from previous promotional efforts.
Hi Mark,
So he now knows that these “old links” still carry value and if he also controls the websites which they sat on then he could reinstate them…or maybe post links to other sites which he wants to promote. So not all bad news?
Colin
Hi Mark,
Where did my traffic go!! Jk :)
No seriously the links I removed were paid links, only a few but they obviously carried a little weight, still removing them has highlighted a few interesting concepts.
I reinstated the links a few weeks later but Google saw that one coming and it had little effect. Maybe Google has some sort of algorithm that looks for dips in link profiles and if those dips are followed with peaks it could trigger some sort of paid links signal?? I’m not sure, the links are down again now and still no impact on rankings.
The other interesting side of this is that even though I have lost a few core terms, ‘google seo’ , ‘search engine optimisation’, ‘seo’, ‘seo consultant’ just to name a few, my long tail traffic has gone through the roof! Literally, keywords pulling in 5 visits a month or less has gone from 1069 unique keywords to 3544 in 3 months, those keywords are driving nearly 1000 uniques a day on average.
It’s all very weird.
From experience the high rankings I had were literally glory rankings, made me look good but brought very little in terms of leads and ranking 4th for ‘search engine optimisation’ barely brought 4 visits a day and not 1 conversion in 4 months.
Still it’s nice to be on top, I am going to pull it back I just need to pick the right strategy.
Wow! Only just realised how long this comment is!! Must have touched on a sore point :)
Hi Tim, thanks for the comment.
Just like Transformers, with Google theres always more than meets the eye… I just thought it made a good story and highlighted some of the issues with cleaning up link profiles that i have personally experienced.
… those glory terms sound great as throw away comments when speaking to clients tho lolz.
Srsly. all cudos to you dude, most people would have been too scared to touch their link profiles (myself included).
Participating seriously in social networking sites, SEO benefits are aparent. To take full advantage of your social networking user profile, you must Build your brand by putting in a blog, generating white papers and accumulating the content through ping.fm, Do the tagging and bookmarking which directly points to your website and produce content in PDFs, video files, podcasts, slideshows and articles.
I think this just proves that you never know exactly what is working and what doesn’t when it comes to SEO. The best we can do is keep doing reputable techniques and figure out what works and what doesn’t for your site.