Why did I take a nose dive on november 6?

[MartinePeters]

Note: Domain listed below is NSFW

Hi guys and girls,

I dont know WHY this seemed to have happened for my little webshop www.reallovesexdolls.com

At this moment I raised my paid per click campaign so i still get visitors. But that costs too much money. Dont know what I did wrong, everything seemed so great.

How can I make a fast recovery?

[Dr-Pete]

Those particular forum links are definitely low-quality. "Black-hat" is kind of a loaded phrase, I find, but if you had a lot of links like those, you'd be potentially getting yourself into trouble.

The problem is that, when most of us see low-quality links, we assume there are more like it. Right now, those links aren't showing up, so that may be an assumption.

The other issue is that, if your link profile is weak right now - if these really are the only links you have - then the quality of those few, initial links can matter even more. It's very important to start out with a solid base, or even a chunk of medium-spammy links can hit you a lot harder.

[MartinePeters]

Isnt it so that I just have links coming from www.dollforum.com?

PLEASE let me know if there are links that look like black hat SEO. I dont know where to find the links that have been built on my behalf.

I havent gotten a penalty btw.

[Dr-Pete]

Has anyone been doing link-building on your behalf? The pattern of links definitely looks intentional, and 99% of the time, that ends up being someone (an employee, an agency, a consultant, etc.) working on behalf of the site. If you have any other parties involved in the search efforts on your behalf, I'd make doubly sure to get a status report one exactly what they've been doing.

[MartinePeters]

Thanks very much for your answers. We havent been doing any link building whatsoever. We have not been doing any black hat seo either.

[Dr-Pete]

I'm seeing evidence for a big chunk of forum links and other potential link quality issues - I agree with PeaSoupDigital that, a sudden spike in visibility followed by a crash can be a bad sign of aggressive link-building. However, that's very speculative on my part, given limited evidence.

Also seeing some odd issues with Google caching different titles and meta-data than I currently see on the page. I don't see any clear evidence of cloaking, but it looks like Google re-cached today and is still showing different info, which seems odd. I'm wondering if your adult content pop-over is causing issues. Honestly, that's a bit outside of my expertise.

Are there particular keywords where you saw a drop?

[MattAntonino]

Martine,

I remember speaking with you earlier this year about your site and SEO. I don't remember why we didn't move forward as I've moved away from the agency I was working with and don't have access to those emails anymore. But you really do need to hire an SEO. I'd love to chat with you again about this if you want to PM me.

Your SEO drops mainly because everyone in your niche is constantly moving. They are spamming, rising, falling, dropping you, pushing you up -- until you get enough of the right authority, you're going to be pushed around quite a lot in the search results. They have A LOT of authority and push you around because your own is mostly limited to dollforum.com if I remember it right.

Also, it looks like you changed your website a bit. I would have to dig into the specifics but if URLs changed and were not handled properly on the change, you could lose a lot of authority that way. Not sure how much the change was simply aesthetic.

When you do hire someone, do hire someone who enjoys working within this industry as they're going to have to do competitor research and the such. I understand why you got the NSFW tag given your site but there are plenty of people who are happy to work on adult SEO and adult clients. You should use someone who has enough experience and doesn't think it's "ew, squishy."

[PeaSoupDigital]

I'm not going to check your site as the subject seems very NSFW, but your Search Metrics Visibility score seems to have taken a massive tumble (see pic).

Your score was only 10 at the start of October and had increased to 1,600 in just 4 short weeks, which looks like a very unnatural growth rate and would suggest you've been employing some black-hatted tactics...

Have you received a message from Google in Webmaster Tools regarding a penalty?

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