Trying To Escape An SEO Black Hole Part 3 – Things Are Getting Worse Rather Than Better

This post is the third of a series documenting my attempts to retrieve one of my money sites from the depths of ranking despair.

Unfortunately things seem to be getting worse, rather than improving. My “black hole” site, which has an exact match domain (EMD) name of the form “NicheCity.net”, got hit by the Google EMD update around the end of September.

This caused a ranking decrease for the matching search phrase of over 150 places!

I had issues with the Holistic SEO link building service as well. 4 out of the 10 Web 2 pages linking back to my site were deleted. When I pointed this out on my support ticket, I was told that it was not unusual for this to happen. To their credit within 4 days another 30 separate Web 2 pages linking back to my site had been created.

My other issue was that these pages are supposed to be getting their own “heavy back linking”. I would assume that this back linking would give these pages some page rank (PR), so I would have expected a shift in PR from PR N/A to at least PR0. This hasn’t happened yet and I have queried this on the support ticket, but have yet to receive a reply.

Here’s my latest rankings update, 1 month after starting with the Holistic SEO Service:

That table is not a pretty sight, so I can only hope that things improve before I do my next case study update.

Links to the other posts in this case study series:

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