Unless backlinks are authoritative or content specific, you are unlikely to see any benefit. As for ranking changes, g has been rolling out, in waves, more content and quality critical updates. Many are feeling the pain.

Meanwhile, stop digging holes and wait to see what is really happening with you and your competitors.

How are you "building links"?

how many backlinks did you do and for how long?

There is no rhyme or reason to it. While our SEO guy has worked for many weeks to bring some of our keywords back to the first page and even #1, we can't help but notice irregularities that cannot be explained.

For example how a site with 20 years of authoritative history on those keywords, 8,000+ backlinks (used to have 34,000), informative and instructional internal blogs, external blogs referencing links back to key pages, and quality references including links from Wikipedia, is out ranked by another new site of ours that has one web page and less than 400 backlinks.

Also, one keyword string is #4 in Australia, while in USA it climbed to #32 steadily over a period of weeks but dropped out of sight (100+) within a week.

I would dearly love to hear their super intelligent reasoning for that.

would dearly love to hear their super intelligent reasoning for that.

Kendo, not sure whether your question is simply rhetorical unhappiness, or whether you expect an answer.

...our SEO guy has worked for many weeks to bring some of our keywords back to the first page and even #1, we can't help but notice irregularities that cannot be explained.

Sorry to hear that. We of ocurse have no way of knowing, but it certainly sounds like your SEO guy might have built links that were too obviously manipulative, and perhaps too aggressive as well. For that kind of drop, it certainly sounds like he pushed too many buttons too quickly or unnaturally, and perhaps rang some alarm bells.

You might want to chat with him and find out what he did, and check that against Google guidelines, and self-examine your directives to him.... I would review, eg, whether his mission was to recover those page-one positions no matter what the consequences, or whether he was directed to fire up a relevant and sustainable long term link building strategy. Again, Google values freely given editorial links for content that's useful, unique, and relevant.

I know there's one Google patent that contains within it wording which acknowledges the pressures that the spam team knows are often put onto an SEO by the client.... It's a difficult situation for some SEOs to be in when they know better. For some SEO's who don't know better, it might have been a way of unleashing their worst tendencies.

It would be of help to everyone here if you found out and let us know here (without keyword or domain specifics), what the strategy was. We seldom get that kind of feedback. Good luck.

Also, one keyword string is #4 in Australia, while in USA it climbed to #32 steadily over a period of weeks but dropped out of sight (100+) within a week.

I would dearly love to hear their super intelligent reasoning for that.

i agree with bob here.
it is quite likely that your SEO guy was successful until the pattern of link building became apparent.
there are several reasons why something could affect US results and not AU results.

I checked with our SEO guy and we haven't changed strategy since when he started at the beginning of September. Sure, as the client I am pushing for results but he has maintained a stringent routine each week, namely internal blogs and external blogs that I write each week, plus the usual ads and social media strategy. When he started I bootstrapped the site for mobile phone support and revised everything based on his advice. That is what got most of our keywords back onto the first page. We started with keywords that sell our best and most popular software but that is a very competitive field. However we have gotten back to page one, two and three for most of them. Then we started looking at promoting a software which is not as popular but in a class of its own. Unfortunately its keywords are targeted by the anti-virus industry even though what we provide is not similar at all. And that is where the crunch lays.

When we began promoting our 3 word string it not appear for more than ten pages of results, once I counted to 130+ and gave up. But by applying our usual strategy for the those keywords they crawled up from the dead, moving up each week until they finally got to page three. Then this last week they dropped off the map. But only in the USA where we usually rank higher than in Australia overall.

While we have been monitoring placement weekly for each set of keywords and logging their movement I have seen some weird things that can only be explained as experiments gone wrong and then corrected. I doubt very much if they really know what they are doing at all. Then when I hear people from Google saying that this/that is no longer supported and that everyone should use WordPress I know that I am dealing with newly borns who have no idea how to construct a web page.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, established businesses who created niche industries cannot be found by search.

The fun thing that folks sometimes forget is that while SEO (webmaster side) is always being adjusted and new things inserted to "get to the top" g is on the other side fiddling and adjusting to make sure that does not happen.

In both instances above each party tends to over-correct, which results in very strange behavior.

Attempting to make changes hourly is impossible, weekly, semi-possible, monthly is more reasonable (though corporate big wigs want results NOW!) ...

Minor fiddles over longer periods of time have a better chance of actually changing things that STICK.

In both instances above each party tends to over-correct, which results in very strange behavior.

No more was done than use a stripped down bootstrap (not a bloated CMS like WordPress) to be mobile friendly, ensure that every image had an alt tag, each page had a H1 tag and properly worded page titles and descriptions. We have always had a menu across the top, in the side bar and the footer because we find that visitors have a problem finding anything when it is right there in front of them. Any additional changes that may have been made were on Google and other "authoritative" advice that recommended moving JavaScript includes to the bottom of the page and compressing CSS where possible. Our images have always been compressed and we have always used an offsite resource for larger images like headers and banners.

That rebuild in this case is not the problem because since then the site has improved in rankings across all keywords (but one), and if Google does actually penalise changes in website design, templates, etc, then that definitely would be a dumb idea.

But yes, I too see examples where they down rank sites that look like they are more professionally designed and managed. In our keyword searches I always see one web site come in on the first page of results when it has not been changed in more than 10 years and has no relevance to the keyword except a H1 tag. I also see other sites ranked higher than ours when I know that they only have 1-3 web pages and only 60 backlinks. I know that because they are my sites.

Proof that Google is about nonsense can be seen in how some of those sites rank in results. I created 20 brand new web sites, each with about 3 web pages, that link to each other. That is where the 60 backlinks come from. And those sites rank higher than our main site which has 20+ domain history plus a history as authoritative for its content and with thousands of backlinks that include all sorts of sites like news sites, wikis, edus and social media etc.

My conclusion is that Google is not about quality of search at all, but instead extorting for ad sales.

Or they can recognize and PBN (even it that was not intended...).

Sometimes we just get too clever and get caught.

Or they can recognize and PBN

What is "PBN"?

I guess that there will always be different interpretations of Google's worth. Here we have 2 different sides of the coin. On one side there are webmasters trying to make a living from ad revenue. Then on the other side are webmasters managing business sites that are trying to make a living from sales of their product.

Unfortunately the same ranking rules apply to both, or do they? Either way, who are they targeting, the ad cheats or link spammers? When I read here about traffic drops it must be the ad sites complaining because my traffic is very boring, samo samo throughout the year. The only change has been the few extra visitors looking for our type product that has resulted in sales, and that has come from changes that we made since September.

Like most business sites, I preferred the days of Yahoo.

What is "PBN"?

private blog network

Well that keyword string of mine that dropped off the map last week is back on the first page of results. Other keywords are either holding or crept up 1-2 places. Some at #1-3 so things are not that bad at all. Whatever they did last week seems to be fixed.

Lost 500 backlinks but a comparison with last week shows that a few sites may have dropped off the Internet. But that is strange because I also see a lot of backlinks that have not existed for a few years. Makes one wonder how they can find new backlinks so efficiently when they don't miss backlinks from sites that site went offline 10 years ago. Some that were removed from the list do still exist, while other backlinks from the same site are still listed. My conclusion is that their process is a long way from being perfected.

Possibly ... or is merely running through everything they have (and have had for decades) just to make sure things are as expected ... or if bad pennies have turned up again. :)

The one thing SEO does not preach is PATIENCE. Most times these drops are temp, but create a chit storm of angst that gets amplified ... only to not have been anything in the first place.

YMMV
.