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This week’s Ask an SEO question comes from Marlin in Bethel, who asks:
“I paid over $5,000 for SEO link building.
At first, traffic was boosted.
However, we then lost our rankings on those keywords and our traffic is gone! What happened?”
Marlin, without seeing your backlink profile, I suspect your rankings declined because Google has flagged the new links as unnatural.
In other words, those links are low quality.
It’s not uncommon to have a boost at first, as you mentioned, and then a decline.
For instance, the link builder might have been getting good, relevant links in the beginning but then moved to lower quality links as the link opportunities dwindled.
Google provides examples of “unnatural links” in its guidelines, including:
- Bookmark site links.
- Low-quality directories.
- Forum comments with optimized links.
- Keyword-rich anchor text in articles and press releases posted on sites other than your own.
You can see the full list here: Link Schemes.
Google will typically ignore these types of low-quality or spammy links.
John Mueller confirmed this in January 2022 in this Twitter thread:
You should just ignore that. Some tools make assumptions about...
Read Full Story: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/5000-link-building-ask-an-seo/447277/
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