Decrease in SERPs After Building Links
Webmaster forums are full of “quick link building ban” myths and novice webmasters are well afraid to push to the limits during their link building campaigns.
In fact the decrease in SERPs are true, but this is not any kind of “banning”. Search engines, especially the big “G” use very complicated formulas to rank sites on the search results, considering many aspects. This means that temporary de-indexing or sharp decrease in SERPs is perfectly normal if you’re putting in more than you already have.
Uh? What does that mean?
Well, think that you’re a kid being selected for a one of 10 basketball teams that are separated according to the average heights of the players. Team 1 has the tallest players and team 10 has the shortest. If your height do not change much over time and your height fits into the 7th team, then it’s easy for the coach to say “go train with the 7th team players”. But what if you gain 1 inch per day? Today you belong to the 7th team, tomorrow to the sixth and so on. The Coach is rather lazy and he does not want to deal with you everyday. So he puts you in a team where you’re surely over-qualified and waits until the increase in your height is in logical limits. And finally he places you to the team where you actually belong.
The analogy may be stupid : ) but the fact is true. If your site has 1000 inbound links and you’re building 5 links per day that will probably won’t do any harm. But if your site has 300 inbound links and you’re building 100 links per day then prepare to get a decrease in SERPs. Google waits until “incremental increase in links/total links” value to be logical until it re-ranks your site – probably to a much higher position.
The biggest evidence to this theory is that if the decrease was just about number of links created, then most of the giant sites would fluctuate in SERPs since they gain tons of inbound links every second. They don’t undergo a decrease in SERPs because the incremental increase is low enough compared to their overall link count.
We’re currently conducting an experiment on this. We’ve bought a new domain and started a very aggressive link building campaign. Most of the 7th-8th page rankings suddenly dissappeared as the number of inbound links increased which is totally in accordance with our theory. We’ll be posting the proceedings of the experiment.
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