New site jumping all over search engine page position

I recently developed a site and did a little seo. It was up to around position 50-55 in one of the major search engines. Then it dropped to 197 and now its not even in the top 300?

Is this normal? will it bounce back again?

 

Some more established sites I've worked on are bouncing around the 150-200 position over the last week so I'm seeing the same. No idea when it'll be back, waiting for the next penguin refresh

 

Oh well, I'm just going to be adding more quality content. I haven't used any black hat seo techniques and have only manually added links back to it. Hopefully it will bounce back and then move up the ranks in time.

 

Just make sure you check out your on-page properly e.g. keyword density / anchor texts also - may not have been linking but give everything the once over

 

Thanks Nick. How do I go about doing this? I have signed the site up to Webmasters tools.

 

If you have created too many backlinks too fast or added affiliate links to your site, that may be the cause.

 

I had a site doing this recently however, it now seems to have settled.

I few weeks ago I deleted the link from my AD footer, not sure if this had any relevance?

 

Probably 90% of sites on this forum

 

I've added maybe 3-5 backlinks a day, is that too much? and I haven't added any affiliate links or advertising.

When I check for backlinks in my Webmaster tool only 1 is shown. Perhaps the search engine hasn't indexed the backlings yet?

 

This is very common for new sites, particularly as Blossom mentions if you have just dropped some links in.

 

That should be fine as long as they're not high quality links (PR3 is pushing it), or sitewide links.

 

This is totally normal. Anything ranking on page 6 is going to fly around the rankings like nobody's business. It's almost certainly down to the site being new and nothing else.

Keep building content and great links; forget about your rankings for now because the difference between 55th and 1,000,055th is zero.

@Blossom, why is it fine as long as they're not high quality links? Build as many high quality links as you can!!! If you can get 500 government links in 30 seconds go and do it! Also, sorry to be so blunt, but the days of judging quality on PR are way in the past. Use opensiteexplorer.com to measure Domain Authority and then visit the website yourself to spot for quality content, design and user experience.

 

It's a terrible idea to send high quality links to a new site, it's practically guaranteed to make it jump around for weeks/months if not longer.

I disagree completely.

Talk about teaching your grandmother to suck eggs

I use multiple factors to assess a link's quality, far beyond what you've mentioned.

PR is simply the easiest and fastest metric to refer to without it becoming confusing. In the context of my comment it works.

I've created maybe fifty or so sites from 2001 until now and only one of them has ever bounced around Google due to being new (and that was due to affiliate links).

 

Hmmm I'm still learning thanks for the advice most were pr3-4 some were pr5 links, I think one was pr8. If I keep adding content will my site come back in a few months? I don't want to be flogging a dead horse.

 

Are you inferring that it's a great idea to send bad quality links to a new site?

The best rankings we've ever achieved in a short period of time have bounced around Google. The best rankings we've ever achieved in a long period of time have not bounced around Google. There is a very tidy correlation (but not necessarily causation!) between link building, bouncing and speediness of ranking.

I only mentioned this because as I've seen dozens of mentions of PR 'quality' on AD. PR really is an out dated metric, its value as a gauge of quality is more misleading than beneficial.

Apologies for coming across a little brash, I'm not interested in getting into a credentials war :neutral:

 

This has to be the worst advice I have ever read. I am not even going to bite on the fact you suggest building high quality links to a new domain is a bad idea.

PR is a terrible way to judge link quality for SO many reasons:
- Penguin
- The fact you can easily fake PR
- The longer you go without a PR update the more this metric becomes unreliable.
- Did I mention Penguin?

But then again if you do want to go ahead and use the latest blog network that is selling 50 PR 4 links to anyone that has 20 bucks to spare go ahead and run your business into the ground.

 

Just to clarify I haven't paid for any links, all have been manually posted by me on reputable sites.

 

If your site was "normal" would it suddenly start getting PR3+ links all over the place? Nope.

It would get slow low PR links, the odd PR3 one, and definitely zero PR5 links generally.

500 Gov links would blow your site into the darkest dungeon in Google basement never to be seen again. Unless it was old and well established in the first place.

 

I guess I will let Coca Cola know next time they launch their next big marketing campaign to make sure not to get too many high quality links from news outlets / marketing blogs.

Oh and next time the NHS launch a new health initiative not to get links from local boroughs and other government organisations.

 

Unless you represent a huge brand :?: Comparing a typical Internet Marketing / Affiliate marketing site to Coca Cola or the NHS is ridiculous.