Strange google behaviour

[pokerextras]

I can't imagine what any penalty would be for? As i said, it's been steadily climbing google for poker rakeback as more of my submitted articles have been discovered, used by sites, or gained page rank. It was last crawled june 11th and hasn't been changed at all since. No content, links, nothing. The only guess i have is that possibly google tried to re crawl it a couple of days ago when the server was temporarily down or something? I have no other guess.

[Unknown Webmaster]

For what it is worth, I saw a dramatic increase in search traffic last week and dramatic drop this week.

I asked a similar question a couple of months ago and while the situation were a bit different, I think a lot of the replies are also relevant to your situation:
Site dropped into oblivion - what to do about it?

Also, don't panic
If it has only been 1 day with a lower ranking, I really wouldn't stress about it. I usually try to use the feeling that "I have to do something" to create content for the site. Good content always help your site, regardless of the situation, and some of the other things you may try doing to fix the situation could potentially hurt the site.

[Ridge]

Since you are asking, you have links which are obviously sold at the bottom section, on both these sites, that is against google terms and that could cause a penalty.

[pokerextras]

Obviously sold? All of those are reciprocal, and my home page is pr0 so i couldn't see anybody paying for links on it.

[Ridge]

Well then it looks sold which is just as bad. Not many people do LE on the homepage, especially like what you have there. My mistake -

The other thing is, when you ask a question on here, be ready to hear stuff you won't like. We have all had site reviews done, and its tough. Not personal though. I've been in this business for years now, I have a decent handle on what is what. To me, you have some major issues and will not break too far into the major keywords as is. Everyone has temporary jumps in the SERPS, but google is good at correcting things.

My best advice would be:

Add more content, learn some SEO, add more content, remove those links or change where and how they are displayed because they look like blatant sold links.

Good luck bro

[zerotrouble]

From personal experience I can say it's "Google dance".

If you've been penalized your site would be deindexed and wouldn't even rank top 20-30 for your site name. Neither of that applies to you.

I've been through this and my site has been from #440 position to #12 overnight. It's up to you how to decide to kill time until you're back on.

Google Page Rank Checker | SERP Web SEO tool: Google Top pagerank search: is an excellent tool to keep track of your serps

[CK]

If you've been penalized your site would be deindexed and wouldn't even rank top 20-30 for your site name. Neither of that applies to you.

I've been through this and my site has been from #440 position to #12 overnight. It's up to you how to decide to kill time until you're back on.

Thats not true.

Its only been a few days and the site is still fairly new..only a few months old with very little links to it, Yahoo shows 60 something and half of those look like article submissions. Whatever the reason is for the drop I would definately be alot more cautious in how you obtain links to the site. Quality is better than quantity, Many if not all those sites are obv link farms...I stopped checking after a bit

[pokerextras]

Thats not true.

Its only been a few days and the site is still fairly new..only a few months old with very little links to it, Yahoo shows 60 something and half of those look like article submissions. Whatever the reason is for the drop I would definately be alot more cautious in how you obtain links to the site. Quality is better than quantity, Many if not all those sites are obv link farms...I stopped checking after a bit

are you sure that you're checking the correct site? A yahoo search for xlink:http://www.zenrakeback.com shows 450 links not 60. About 20 of those are from article submissions. The vast majority are from other sites or from left bar links from my other two sites zenkickback.com and pokerteacher.org. I was under the impression that matt cutts made it clear that people linking to you could not adversly affect you. If some of my out links have recently been deemed by google to be link farms, i could see why that would have an adverse effect. The confusing thing is, i've been steadily rising from position 100 to position 40 over a two month time period, then instantly lost 200 positions. Something definitive must have happened to have this effect.

[CK]

lol sorry I didnt hit the from all pages...was like 3 am when I posted ha. was looking at those that are aimed at your homepage. But for whatever reason yahoo canada isnt giving me much more for info either.

Are you buying or just swaps? I see your using linkmarket...or did at one point since you link to that site on your links page and I found a couple other auto link places. I would stop that. Nothing good can come from gaining links that way.

I was under the impression that matt cutts made it clear that people linking to you could not adversly affect you.

Of those links, how many do you think actually help your site? It matters who you link to, who they link to etc and some of the sites link out to weight loss sites, breast enhancement sites, etc, all of that plays a part.

Just because it's a link does'nt mean that your going to benefit from it.

[Matt Geer]

I don't have enough experience to tell you what google is doing, but I did take 20 minutes and look your site over-

When I looked up yahoo, they said there were only 268 links pointing to this site (and yes, it is zenrakeback not kickback). All of the first 5 pages that I looked at consisted of link exchanges (many to unrelated sites), signature links, and article submission directories.

Something that I would like to point out that is rather odd to me is that some of the articles submitted to these directories are quite a bit longer and more detailed than what is offered on zenrakeback itself (Thats a bit backward I think).

On the site itself, I found 2 links that weren't working.

Also, out of 11 links on your side bar 4 of them go to completely different sites ( 3 of them go to zenkickback). And one of these links did not work. Again, this is a lack of experience...but not sure if linking to yourself that many times is good.

These are more "site reviews" items than actual Seo items Im sure, but what you do offer on the size as far as content and information is minimal at best. Many of the reviews are cluttered together and of the 5 that I checked, not one made the use of a <h2-6> tag. I had a hard time following along with some as they were giant 500 word paragraphs in a single column.

Those are some of the things I noticed. As far as Seo is concerned, Im not sure if all the link directories and exchanges are hurting you, but dont imagine they help you much either. And in regards to the other items I pointed out on the site, they may not fix the overall problem either but should help and at the very least, it will help make the site more useful and pleasant to browse.

Overall, it seems as if you have a mini-site that is trying to rank for something competitive like "Poker Rakeback" with plenty of outgoing links and of the first 5 pages I noticed, hardly anything worthwhile pointing at you.