Article Submission – The Three Month Phenomenon
We’ve seen a trend that commonly repeats itself with marketers that are new to SEO and article submission. We call it the Three Month Phenomenon. It is misleading and can really bite you hard if you’re not aware of it. Here’s what happens.
At First…
A new marketer that is not intimately familiar with SEO will likely start with a single tool. The logic is that they’ll start small, see how it goes and then add or change tools or services down the road. So they start off on their article marketing and SEO campaign with the latest and greatest tool.
At first things are slow – that’s pretty much the way it always goes. Then after some consistent effort for a few weeks they start to see some results and become convinced this new tool is working (indeed, it is). Now, positive momentum and their belief in this whole “SEO thing” starts to kick in and they begin aggressively using the tool. If a little was good, then more must be better, right?
The Bomb Drops
This usually continues for a three or four month total time period and then, not always, but often times their site, overnight, drops its rankings 100+ positions. Their rankings that were on page #1 are now on page #12. So, what the heck happened? And why?
This very common problem has been observed by us for numerous clients and members of our coaching program (NOTE: If you’re interested in the coaching program submit a ticket via the helpdesk and we’ll get back to you subject to availability) – it is actually pretty common. Most newbies incorrectly assume that they’ve been manually penalized by Google. But let me tell you, that is extremely rare. Google simply doesn’t have the time or resources to look at very many sites manually. Instead what has likely happened is that you’ve come up across some programmatic threshold and Google has automatically reassessed your sites rankings and found them to be “suspect” so it’s bumped you back and will continue to observe.
What to do?
So, what do you do? First of all, relax. After all, if you’re playing in the realm of SEO, you must bow to the Google gods and they’re not always very gracious or receptive – it’s just part of the process. Okay, so now that you’ve “taken a breathe”, here are the things that you need to do. First of all, don’t stop linkbuilding. That’s right, don’t stop. If your site looks “suspicious” and they bump it back and you get disappointed and stop, well you’ve just confirmed their suspicions. Just keep plugging away at about the same pace you’ve been, but you need to shift your strategy around to combat the likely culprit – over-optimization.
Understanding Over-Optimization
So what is over-optimization? In a nutshell it means that your site linkbuilding profile doesn’t look very “natural”. In other words, when a site obtains links organically, they are very, very diversified. They have miss-spellings, they have big long sentences that are all hyper-linked, they have useless anchor text like “click here” and “download this report”. And, most importantly, they have a lot of links to the domain with various flavors of the domain name as the anchor text – www.domain.com, http://www.domain.com, Domain.com, domain com, domain (dot) com, etc… This is what you find when you analyze sites that have a very organic link profile – it’s natural. But newbies often think “I’m spending all of this money on SEO I don’t want to waste it on useless links” and so all of their links are 100% anchor targeted – that’s just not natural. If your site is brand new and has 200 links total and 95% of them are “best weight loss product”, well, that just doesn’t look right.
So, initially your work is paying off and you’re seeing good results, but then suddenly you hit some magic threshold (sorry, you’ll have to consult the Google gods to know what that threshold is) and they flip a switch on your site. More than likely, however, you can recover from this pretty quickly.
Still Indexed?
The first thing that you want to do is to make sure that your site is still in the Google Index. If it has been de-indexed, well, that’s serious and it’s beyond the scope of this post (that means, yes, you can officially be worried now). To check if your site is in the Google Index, just issue this very simple search:
site: yoursitename.com
If it’s still in the index, you should get a bunch of search results back – the pages that are Indexed by Google. If you get no results, then double check you didn’t make a typo somewhere because short of that the very unfortunate news is that you indeed have been de-indexed. If you have been, well, you really need to assess if it’s even worth continuing to work on that domain. Being de-indexed is serious and may take many months to recover from – if ever. Google has essentially “black-listed” your site.
Getting Back on Track
So assuming you’re still indexed, but sitting back in the low 100’s instead of page 1 or 2, here’s what you need to do. The best way to combat this is to immediately change your linkbuilding and shift it in the other direction for awhile before stabilizing on a more natural all around approach. So for a couple of weeks, just do about 80% of your links to the domain as the anchor text as well as other non-relevant anchor text and keep your targeted anchor text to only about 20% or so. The point of this is to shift the total numbers site-wide to be more natural. Since you were exaggerated in one direction at the beginning, we need to overcompensate a bit now to swing the pendulum the other direction. After doing this for a couple of weeks, you should settle down to an overall balanced and appropriate mix for a natural linkbuilding profile.
Using this technique we’ve helped many sites bounce right back up into the rankings. Sometimes it takes a few weeks, but we’ve seen it work as quickly as three or four days too – it just all depends. If this does not work then there are other factors going on outside of the over-optimization issues. Likely culprits are that you have a very high bounce rate on the site or very low visitor time on site, etc… – things that lead Google to conclude that your site is simply not very valuable. Another possible culprit is too much linkbuilding relative to the traffic you’re getting. If your site is not getting hardly any traffic, doesn’t have an RSS subscribers, etc… but yet you’re dropping 30 links a day to it, well, again, it just probably doesn’t look right to Google.
One More Thing…
Lastly, there is another three month phenomenon that occurs where instead of dropping abruptly, the rankings just begin to “slowly wither”. You find it odd because you’re doing the same thing you’ve been doing effectively the past three or four months, but suddenly the more you work the less of a difference it seems to make. There are many possible causes of this situation, but one of the most likely culprits for newbie SEO’ers is that they have been using the same tool and nothing else for this period of time. What has likely happened is that you have exhausted the domain diversity of the tool and so the new links that you’re getting just don’t pack as much punch as they did a couple months ago.
Let’s explain that a little further. There is a difference between having 200 links from one domain and 200 links from 200 domains. Each link is essentially a “vote” from that site to yours. Who do you think Google is going to view as being more popular – the guy with 200 friends all voting once for him? Or the other guy with one friend voting 200 times and stuffing the ballet box? This is referred to as domain diversification and it is important in your natural linkbuilding profile. If the tool or service that you are using has a small number of domains that it distributes too, then after a certain period of time you just begin to get a bunch of repeat domains for your postings and thus they begin to lose effectiveness. This is one of the very reasons that we recommend you use various products and services and keep mixing it up.
Good luck!
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On July 29, 2010 Anida wrote:
This is precisely what I have been telling my clients about. The SEO is long term and that they should take it easy. But it is sometimes difficult to tame their excitement!
On July 30, 2010 Get Rid of Spyware wrote:
I have enjoyed this post very much. Makes me think about changing my link building strategy slightly. But it almost feels like a waste to not use anchor text!
On August 4, 2010 Christianne wrote:
Thanks for this article. It just confirms my suspicions that link building should be done at a maintained pace, month after month after month. You stop and your rankings go down.
On August 7, 2010 Jae Smith wrote:
Excellent article. I will be sure to send this to my lists. This is another “tool in the box” for my customers. Thanks! Jae Smith :þ
On August 13, 2010 Luca wrote:
I’ve gotten away with using only useful anchor text (to inner pages). But I always use 4 per page. Google knows we’re linking – I don’t do ‘throwaway’ words to pretend I’m not a marketer.
I also have had suprising success from just working long term and linking steadily ie. no spikes. This works amazingly well. You do need patience. Or clients that do
.
For the home page I guess I have to use url/site name type links so I include them. Useless directories are good for this purpose.
On August 31, 2010 Tony wrote:
I notice this site has much to do with mainly article submission services. What is your stance on other link building methods such as directory submission, social bookmarking, and making profiles on forums with your anchor text? Is article marketing by far the most effective? Should we still focus on these other methods?
On September 3, 2010 Kate Croom wrote:
Two of our sites disappeared for several weeks and then reappeared. We couldn’t find them with site: yoursitename.com but for whatever reason. Google didn’t make the ban permanent.
On September 12, 2010 Troy wrote:
Hi Tony,
While the site is “Article Submission Review” yes, we view article submission and article marketing as just one part of a successful SEO campaign. To get a good feel about our perspective on SEO, please download our free eBook. It’s full of nothing more than our feelings on the matter, so it should answer a lot of your questions. The bottom line is that our approach to SEO is to appear “natural” – which, is funny considering everything about SEO is “artificial”. Much of the linkbuilding that we do, we do not feel will contribute greatly to the cause (moving rankings in the SERPs) but we do it to have a natural linkbuilding profile and not raise red flags. Contrary to many who want to take shortcuts, we don’t believe that is wise. It may work for a while, but later it will bite you. We use all of the methods you mention – directory links, profile links, article marketing, etc… There are two things that really affect you – sheer volume and quality. So, some of those linking strategies are good for volume, but for quality you want to go with a middle to high PR link network – our recommendation is Build My Rank. It is the cleanest and most effective network out there right now.
Hope that helps…
-Troy
On September 28, 2010 Rick Imby wrote:
Great article. I remember the first website that I worked on that jumped up in the rankings. So I did a whole bunch more of the same stuff and it jumped out of the rankings. This appears to be a great way to overcome losing all rankings.
Thanks
On October 15, 2010 Morsel wrote:
You know, this is why I find the no-follow/do-follow debate a waste of time. Sure you are not likely to have good link juice with a nofollow link back but it is very dubious for your site to have just do-follow links. It’s not organic and Google will penalize you for it.
On October 29, 2010 Breny Kindred wrote:
This reminds me of an old saying I am sure you have probably heard, “Don’t keep all your eggs in one basket!” This holds especially true in SEO. Depending on one source, strategy or tool will leave you with nothing but scrambled eggs!
On October 29, 2010 Al_Duke wrote:
Great article and got me worried for a second since i was using few anchors on dozens of sites. But i just checked webmasters tool and i have 73 anchors there so it should be fine.
I don’t get one thing really. I managed to appear on first page on google for several big keywords i was optimizing for but i just cant move with the most important one, like google knows i want it badly lol. Im around 4-9th page on google with it and i have it as an anchor from several pr5 pages and pr5 homepages (all related and one way backlinks) among dozens lower pr pages of course. Just several days ago i managed to squeeze in my article with that anchor in body on a high authority site in my niche, and, their site appeared on page 3 for that keyword and im still no where close to it.
I don’t have problems with google but that one. Google visits my site as soon as i post anything and indexes my posts very quickly. Even my posts i republished long ago in article directories are ranked higher than same posts on lets say ezine or squidoo. Maybe its bounce rate since entrecard users are killing me that way, but wouldn’t bounce rate affect other keywords too?
PS1: I’m on first page on yahoo and bing for that keyword
PS2: My results in google are about the same for all my other keywords when i add “allinanchor” function, only for that big keyword there’s a difference. I’m number 5 when i add that function. Can it be sandbox or?
On November 6, 2010 Troy wrote:
Hi Al_Duke,
It certainly seems that Google “knows what we want” sometimes (and keeps it from us), but you’ve just got to keep with it. Usually that “desired” keyword is tougher than the others and takes extra work. It may also be that it is entrenched in its current spot with a lot of history there and will take awhile to wake Google up that it deserves to move. All of this is very, very common. You just have to keep at it. With links and SEO attention will come results. Don’t worry about the bounce rate, just continue to focus on your linkbuliding for that keyword. It’s hard to say without knowing the keyword and niche, but in general “bottom up” SEO is the way to go. So if it’s a two word keyword, find about 5 or 6 keywords that are 3 or 4 word longtail variations of that keyword but contain it exactly. For example, if the keyword were “dog grooming” then find keywords like “dog grooming on a budget” and “affordable dog grooming”. Notice how the primary keyword is contained within both of those longtails? Then continue to do your linkbuilding on the primary but really focus on those 5 or 6 long tail variations. We call this “bottom up” SEO because you’re starting at the bottom and working your way up towards the more desired keyword. The best advice is merely to keep at it – time and links heal most all SEO deficiencies…
Hope that helps…
-Troy
On November 6, 2010 Troy wrote:
Exactly on point Breny Kindred…
The fact is that most people are looking for a “magic SEO bullet” when the reality is that common sense should be your guide. And common sense dictates maintaining a natural link building profile with a lot of link diversity. The biggest problem is that when you try to maintain a natural linkbuilding profile, it means that a lot of your efforts are really not going to have any direct impact on results – they’re just for link counts and appearance sake. That causes many to try and circumvent “common sense” and look for cheaper “short cuts”…
Thanks,
-Troy
On November 30, 2010 ian wrote:
So on your last point Troy, would you advise doing things like link building on blog comments etc just to make your links look more natural?
On November 30, 2010 Troy wrote:
Yes, I do recommend blog comments (dofollow and nofollow), forum linking and profile linking – they all have their place. However, none of these are going to move you in the SERPS and they are the lowest value of link type there is. That being said, it doesn’t mean that they have NO VALUE – just a much lower value and importance than other types of links. But keeping it natural, means mixing it up and for that, they are good. Also, don’t be scared away by “nofollow” links – it’s all just part of the equation and it all helps to some extent. Diversification is the key here…
On December 23, 2010 jeff wrote:
this is food for thought…..so many “marketers” wouldnt want to tell you this!!
Thanks for the advice cheers
On February 17, 2011 Kelvin wrote:
Well written !
As an experienced marketer, I already knew most of this but you always learn an extra thing or two as well.
On February 20, 2011 Naveeda wrote:
Awesome awesome tip. I do think about this, but always thought, hey, why not push the envelope as far as a can in terms of getting exact match anchor text. Not a lot of SEO people talk about this.
Great site by the way, I purchased TBS through your link.
On February 26, 2011 Troy wrote:
Thanks Naveeda.
Yes, unfortunately many will push that envelope but keep in mind if you push too hard, it tends to “break” – and that was the point of the article really…
And thanks for purchasing TBS through our link…
On March 2, 2011 andrew wrote:
Hi Troy,
I am a newbie unlike the more seasoned SEO folk commenting here. I started learning about SEO in Jan 2010 and started/published my site in June 2010. It has about 22 pages. Some pages showed up on google in Nov 2010 in the Top 100 for some of the keywords after some backlinking. It disappeared by mid Dec from google an reappeared on the 1st page for 2 keywords and on page 2 and 3 for the other keywords last week. Yesterday it disappeared from google again. I hope it is temporary and am staying positive. Do you think this is normal for all the keywords to drop from google at the same time? (Thanks for all the info in your article.)