Drop in Rankings After Removing Links

[ThridHour]

So  I removed some links to a particular homepage for one of the sites we own, this page had A LOT of links pointing to it using exact match anchors. And for the most part the links were coming from low quality pages/content. After removing a good chunk of them I noticed are rankings went down from around 8-9th two weeks ago to 21 as of today. Has anyone else had a problem like this before?

I'm thinking about restoring some of these links now to see if I can recover some of that. Any thoughts on doing this?

Thanks

[ThridHour]

Update on this issue........

I ended up restoring a few of the links I removed but none of the truly crappy ones. It seems though I was just needing to be a little patient. This latest algo update shot be back up to 8th after I had dropped to 30th (after removing a ton of links). So it seems those links were still passing pagerank even though they were total garbage and didn't offer any value whatsoever. I think this is evidence that Google's quality standard when it comes to links definitely went up. Which I guess goes without saying but it's good to have proof. I also hadn't done anything else to the site for the last couple months other than remove those links so there shouldn't have been any other variables at play.

[donford]

I see, Anthony provides some good insights below.

Removing inbound links from other domains thus effects your overall inbound links which then can have an impact on your natural ranking. Restoring them will probably fix the immediate issue. BUT! There is a fine line here that should be discussed.

You don't want to become a victim of link manipulation this can be done by buying a crap ton of domains making some generic content and point them back to one another or just one, creating an internal link ring or link funnel. This will eventually get you penalized. Now, owing a handful of sites and pointing them to one another is perfectly acceptable. An example being Pepsico pointing to Pepsi, Mt. Dew, Taco Bell, Quaker Oats, Tropicana ect.. these are all companies they own. In fact our company owns 3 branded websites, but we were careful only pointing to relevant pages when it suits the user's experience. You may have been benefiting from a form of this, which is why your rank dropped whence you removed the links.

Hope that makes sense.

Don

[ThridHour]

I've done this to several of our other sites and haven't seen a ranking increase or decrease. They have all continued to have roughly the same amount of organic traffic. So I'm assuming these links were really doing nothing from an SEO standpoint and probably a ticking time bomb ready to go off when the next major algo update rolls out.

I may have just gotten a little overzealous when removing them on this particular site. It was for a pretty significant keyword so I'm tempted to maybe restore at least some of them and see what it does.

[ThridHour]

I meant links to the homepage of a site from other sites that we happen to own.

[anthonydnelson]

Removing backlinks, especially ones with money anchor text, will most definitely cause your rankings to decrease. I can only assume you did this because you viewed the links as spammy or something that could eventually cause you future ranking problems at an algorithmic or manual level. If that is the case, you probably made the right decision if you are hoping this site will rank for the long-term.

Instead of restoring those links, try to find a way to create a few new ones that you feel are safe for the long-term.

[donford]

Rankings are dynamic. Moving 1-3 spots from day to day or even hour to hour is actually common and not really concerning. Now dropping from page 1 (rank 8), to page 3 (rank 21) would be something I would certainly want to to watch.

When you said you removed the links to your homepage from lower ranking pages.. my first question is why? Were they redundant links? Ie you can click a banner or home page button instead? If not, then you are creating orphan pages which from a useability standpoint is not good. A user should always be able to get to your homepage or any main topic pages very easily and apparent. Just look at this forum, even in edit post mode I can still get to Moz.com homepage in 1 click.