Rank Drops After New Links Created

[RMcdonald]

I know what you're all thinking, that these are bad links and you need to remove them from your profile to avoid further ranking drops.

But the links are from great sites, with good metrics. My anchor text ratio isn't overly optimised and the On-Page is good, possibly still needs some small tweaks but nothing major.

At the end of August the keyword was ranking #16, however over the past week ( I have been actively link building ) the site's rankings have gone down to #37. I am wondering if anyone has had this happen before? I am thinking it's down to Google picking up the new links and reconsidering our position. But, if you feel it isn't then feel free to let me know.

Here is the graph showing the movement:

Any ideas would be great!

 

[CCarter]

Simply wait and do not over-react. Google can be monitoring to see if you do anything rash and then further drop your rankings. If the sites are good and not part of a PBN the rankings should pop back up after a timeframe (2 weeks to 2 months).

You are playing a game of chicken with Google, if you flinch you’ve lost.

 

[RMcdonald]

Yeah I know, the good old waiting game!

It's the first time I have seen a large drop ( although this keyword is national, 27k searches and very competitive ) so I assume that Google is making sure our page is right before making it's decision to push us higher.

The sites are geniune blogs, sourced through outreach and worked for! No PBN's here

Yeah I guess you're right, as making radical changes can only worsen the situation!

Thanks for the advice @CCarter

 

[Sutra]

Is normal. Happens to me at times as well. Sometimes the keyword pops back up quickly, other times it takes a few weeks. Just let it be and all should be good.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Google has a Rank Transition patent they use in the algorithm. This is what people refer to as a bounce and it's a good sign that what you did was powerful in terms of Page Rank, which is what seems to trigger it.

It basically goes like this: you get an influx of Page Rank and you'll see one of three things happen:

1. You get positive movement
2. You get negative movement
3. You get no movement

Once one of these is chosen, it lasts for a random period for up to 90 days total. So you may see a flat out delay in postive movement for 3 months or even a negative bounce for that long. Or maybe a week. I don't see the full 90 days happen often. But the strength of the negative movement is typically a reflection of how strong the positive movement will be.

What everybody hopes to see is immediate positive movement, but this randomization factor is in place to make it so people can't easily reverse engineer the algorithm and to demoralize spammers.

 

[RMcdonald]

Thanks @Ryuzaki

This is why I love this forum, People delivering real value and also helping out with sometimes scary situations! I've been doing a lot of link building over the past 3 months to get ranking for this competitive keyword, so it sounds like I might be seeing the fruits of my labour very soon!