Why did my rankings drop?

[Mulith]

Hi all,

In July I started to re-energise my link building efforts by getting a proper campaign together to build links.

Despite building about 20 new links my traffic has actually fallen. Here a a breakdown of what happen:

1)Late June I noticed my toolbar page rank up at about PR4 which, despite only being a small part of the algo, was nice to see.

2. Early July I started my link building campaign by getting together a massive list of potential link partners by using Open Site Explorer on my competitors sites.

3)Because I'm a bit pressed for time I decided to go for the easier links first. I sorted my link list by Domain Authority and started to list on  high DA directories used by my competitors. I listed on about 20 of these directories. I also livened up an old links page I'd previously hidden from the SE's because I was planning to do a bit of Link exchanging too.

4. A few days after I started building links from these directories I noticed my traffic start to drop off gradually. I also noticed the toolbar PR go down to PR3.

5. I decided to stop at 20 submissions because it looked like this was effecting traffic. I also removed the links page I'd livened up which produced a temporary improvement in traffic but it's since gone on to get a bit worse.

Traffic is now down by about 10% on when I started buying submissions to directories. I must add that during this period we have also been taking on new clients which, as a a real estate listing site, means we put loads of content on our site for the client. That content is also on the clients website and on other competitors sites. So there would be lot's of a content that appears elsewhere on the net.

Not really sure which of the two has caused the problem and not really sure how to progress. Do I remove the links on the directories? Do I wait for this newly added content to bed down so that new fresh can take it's place in our results which we rank from?

Any help would be appreciated.

[RyanKent]

I'd also updated a clients listings which meant dropping about 1000 pages of older content

That is clearly a large change which should have been mentioned up front.

When you drop a page from your site, you will of course lose any traffic that page generated. Even if those pages were low traffic pages, they did generate some traffic.

When you say the old content was replaced by fresh content, exactly how was this change done? If you have a page named "homes currently for sale" and you update that page with new information, the URL remains the same, the backlinks remain and the overall effects should be positive. Even a normal change such as this one could have a negative impact on traffic though in a corner case such as you listed a popular address or area before, the house sold and was replaced by less popular listings.

There is a lot of analytical data to analyze. How much traffic were the old pages generating vs the new pages which replaced them. How many back links did the old pages have pointing to them? Were all these pages properly redirected?

With respect to links, if your client has money to spend use it on other methods of traffic generation. Pay for high quality content to be created. Pay for advertising. Pay to be entered into the couple of directories that actually make a difference. Pay for A/B testing of the site's pages. Don't pay for junk directory submissions.

[Mulith]

A closer look at the Analytics: Yahoo traffic seems to be down by 60%, especially on long tail terms. The shift happened on the 4th August. In the 10 days prior I had added about 10 paid submissions but I'd also updated a clients listings which meant dropping about 1000 pages of older content and replace it with fresh listings supplied by the client. I wonder!

Overall there is a slight reductions in most keywords but as you say this could be because competitors are building links too.

[RyanKent]

I started building links from these directories

The overwhelming majority of directories are a complete waste of time. They offer absolutely no value at all for SEO, and real visitors will never see and follow the links

I started buying submissions to directories

Buying links is a violation of search engine rules, If and when you are caught, you will suffer a penalty. In the meantime, understand that the search engines know which directories sell links and most likely offer those links no weight at all. If they see your site has acquired links from multiple paid directories they could take that as a sign you are attempting to manipulate rankings.

Despite building about 20 new links my traffic has actually fallen

There are so many factors involved to even begin to properly respond to this statement. If you had 1000 links previously and build 20 links, then you have increased your links by 2% which may not have any effect on traffic at all. You need to research what is driving visitors to your site. Is it organic search results? An advertising campaign? Social networks? etc.

Once you break down the traffic drivers, you need to further investigate the overall traffic. For example perhaps the keyword "vitamins" is the top driver of traffic to your site. You can check to see how much overall traffic the search term provided this month compared to last month.

What are your competitors doing? If you built 20 links and your main competitor built 30 links, or received 1 high quality link, then you may drop in rankings. Your search results are always a competition with your competitors.

In summary, any time you spent with directories is not likely to add value to your site. If you want to use directories the main ones I would suggest are Yahoo, BOTW, DMOZ and Business.com. If your industry has any high quality niche directory that can be considered as well. Otherwise your focus should be on creating very high quality content which is useful and touches upon important industry topics, then obtaining links to that content.