Recently, on the SEOBook Community Forum*, this question was asked:

I built too many incoming links too quickly and tripped a filter sending me from about #17 to #95. Whoops! Not being much of a link builder historically, this has never happened to me before. Is it possible I could just wait it out? I will have some natural links coming in over time to sort of balance things out … it might not kill me since #17 wasn’t too great to begin with. 

Great question!  The topic of tripping filters comes up all the time, let’s take a look at it.

You have a website, it’s been around a while, has a good number of pages in the index and ranks decently for your primary keywords.  You did a little optimization and link building when you launched it so it has a handful of links plus a couple you picked up while you’ve been online.  Other than that, you’ve done almost nothing to the site and things have been OK ranking wise. 

Now life is good until one day you notice your little site with its handful of inbound links has slipped in the search results.  You also notice your competitors are actively marketing their sites and moving up in the rankings  while  you’re moving down.  Life goes from good to crap in a link heartbeat! 

So you decide to quickly fight back by aquiring a large number of one-way links all pointing to your home page.   Then you sit back, rub your hands together gleefully and wait to see your little site climb back up in the serps.

And you wait.  And wait.  And wait some more.  

Then this happens:   

“sending me from about #17 to #95″

Oh crap.

What the heck is happening?  Was I slapped with some +99 , over optimization, under-the-radar, anti-brand, bad neighborhood, they don’t like my hair penalty?  The bad hair thing aside, probably not.  You just tripped a link pop filter and have been tweaked for too many links too fast. 

Search engine algorithms are mathematical equations, you can’t add new numbers to the mix without another part of the equation being affected.   The little site had a history of being a little site with a handful of links so when big changes happened, red flags go up.   All of a sudden the numerical equation behind the  site changed dramatically which caused the site to tank.   When you add a lot of inbound links quickly and nothing else changes in and around your historically quiet site,  you should expect to see either no-or-downward movement.  That type of link growth isn’t natural unless you’re doing something  promotionally to build  links. 

But you’re not doing anything to the site except adding links.   There’s no new content, no increase in search queries, no media mentions (media = social and traditional),  no nothing.  Hoards of people don’t just give away links to a single site/page unless they’ve been asked/paid to do so,  so the engine assumes the links haven’t been acquired editorially and either ignore them or slaps you down. 

Ouch.

At some point time passes and you either add content/traffic/media or the time filter wears off and you see a little improvement in your ranking. Or maybe you don’t because you weren’t smart enough to figure out what was going on when you added those links to begin with so you kept adding MORE. 

The concept of link popularity is simple.  Link quantity, quality, anchor text and relevance all factor into the equation, change one of them dramatically without balancing the rest and the single biggest component of the ranking algorithm will start to scream and throw up flags.  Keep in mind link popularity is also balanced  by 199 additional ranking factors some of which include content, domain age, load rates and search referral traffic.  ALL of these things need to be considered when adding links to a web page/site.

Even for big/branded/competitive sites.   They “get away” with being able to add more links because what they do have established (their reputation, content, traffic, links, involvement in the media) continues to work for them.  Small sites lack that insulation so they need to be careful and remember balancing content, traffic, and links is key.

*The SEOBook Community Forum is  a paid membership platform and part of the SEOBook Training program. 

    Have fun this holiday season!

The search engines have been publishing their “Top Searches” lists for 2009, so far I’ve collected lists from   Bing , Yahoo!, and Google. Other sites posting “top” searches are  ESPN,  Snopes, and my favorite, Yahoo’s Top Video’s (warning: time killer!). I  set my alerts to catch these lists because they spark ideas for link bait and content development we can use to attract links.

All of the lists are valuable but IMO, the best list comes from Ask.com. Why? Because they list the top questions people used as search queries on  Ask.com. The list is divided  by category and includes the top ten questions asked. Here’s an example of one of the categories:

This kind of information is priceless when it comes to SEO and link building for a couple of reasons:  …. (read the rest of the article here on Link Week/Search Engine Land)