Added an article about my ambatchdotcom seocontest Google disaster to GoArticles.com and EzineArticles.com
The GoArtciles submission should be active within a few hours, but the EzineArticles one will take a few days to be manually approved.
The full text of the article submission is below:
How I Went from #5 in Google to Oblivion - Overnight!
One tiny SEO blunder cost over 900 places in Google and took three weeks to fix!
As we all know, linking is King when it comes to placement within the search engines.
The theory is quite simple - the more links you have TO your web site, the better the position you will attain in the SERP's (search engine results pages).
Now while that is basically true... there is a very interesting caveat I recently discovered as part of my involvement in the Ambatchdotcom Seocontest, World SEO Championship 2006.
For those new to such contests, the idea is to achieve top ranking in the search engines for a key term. In this particular contest, the key term is ambatchdotcom seocontest.
The interesting thing about SEO contests is they allow you to try different tactics and see results almost immediately.
However, one result I didn't want was a DROP in place from number 5 to number 950 within just a few days.
The cause?
Some extremely "unnatural" linking that took place.
One of my web sites has approximately 6500 pages on it, so I thought it would be pretty easy to add quite a few links to my Ambatchdotcom Seocontest entry by simply putting it in the footer of each page.
Now as I use include files to generate the footers, that wasn't such a hard task. Simply change one file and all of a sudden, there are 6500 new links to my entry.
It took two days for me to realise that Google had decided to penalise me for doing this, by dropping my position to number 250 in the SERPs.
At which point, I removed my jaw from the floor, and took the link out of the footer file. But not before Google had already indexed some 600 pages.
Another three days later, and Google has put me well and truly in the "basement" around position number 950!
It took another week for my entry to start the push back to position #250, and then it just sat there for another ten days.
Finally, after three weeks in oblivion, all the bad links no longer appear in Google, and I'm back near the top ten.
Linking Lessons Learned?
Natural - i.e. SLOW - linking is the way to go.
DON'T place hundreds of links from one site overnight! You will pay a severe penalty.