Have I been Blooped ?

I recently started a backlink campaign and recently noticed my site for all keywords go down by atleast 3-4 pages.

I was reading about the BLOOP and I read somewhere the BLOOP goes into affect when you get new high pr backlinks?

Is it true you can get harmed before helped if you get BLOOPED?

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For those not familiar with the term, BLOOP = back link over-optimisation penalty whereby an unusual surge in back links to a site is seen as unnaturally gained, or too many back links all with the same anchor text, etc, is said to create a penalty for the site for trying to artificially manipulate the search results.

To be honest, I don't actually give much credence to this as a penalty. If it did exist, then it would be entirely possible to harm a competitor's site by throwing a load of links at them. It would also penalise genuine attempts at creating highly linkable content.

At most, if Google felt that links were gained unnaturally with the sole intention of artificially manipulating search results then I believe that they would simply discount those links, as we saw when they started targeting "paid-for" links.

Before jumping to the conclusion that you've suffered from the latest, greatest, most cutely-named penalty, look at other possible reasons why your site may have dropped.

Have you lost any existing back links?
How old is your site? Could it be a case of the new site boost finishing?
Could it be a small change in Google's algorithm?

same here, and it is for a long time now.
I didn't here about BLOOP, but maybe this is the reason for me to.

is BLOOP the same as Google Sandbox?

Only in the sense that it's likely neither really exist.

The sandbox was a term first coined a couple (?) of years ago, when sites would seem to be artificially suppressed for competitive keywords. At the time it was never convincingly proved that this was a specific phenomenon, and instead it was hypothesised that such a situation was created as a result of other factors within Google's algorithm. These factors came together in certain circumstances to create what appeared to be a "damping" algorithm.

Since then, the notion of the sandbox has persisted -- everyone loves a reason why it's someone else's fault that their site doesn't rank well.

The common reason now as to why such notions persist is that often a new site will experience a "new site boost", whereby Google gives it some 'airtime' by ranking it based purely on its page content, and ignores that lack of back links -- being a new site, then it's not going to be able to compete with established sites' back links directly.

Once this new site boost is removed (anything from a few days to a few months), the site will invariably sink back now that it has to compete on equal terms. This period of reduced rankings tends to be mistaken for a sandbox, ignoring the fact that actually it's just competing on equal terms, and its earlier inflated results were the artificial ones.

Wait so if you have backlinks on a lot of sites, and they're all the same link and anchor, you can get blooped or whatever?

Yes, they can be devalued as being "unnatural". Hence the advice is to vary them as much as possible.

IMHO any algorithm used to determine unnatural anchor text repetition would be based on patterns gained from other sites within the topical niche. Some niches would experience more keyword rich anchor text repetition with few variations, whilst others would experience more variation with less instances of rich keyword anchors. It is thus impossible to suggest how much repetition or how little, as it's niche specific to a degree.

Suffice to say, don't immediately jump on every back link that uses "click here" or your URL as the anchor text and try to get it changed; those links could prove quite useful in the long run.

ok, Thanks for your explanation, jagnet

I can tell you BLOOP does exist. Especially if your agressivly linking, or as I did as a beginner years ago using the same anchor text way too much.

I know I got BLOOPED.. When I read all the posts about it everywhere it just makes sense..

How long does the BLOOP last?