The experiment for the childrens toys website has recovered somewhat with the site returning back from page 10 to the top of page 2 and into position 11 for its childrens toys search term.
Analysis showed me that somebody had placed some heavy sitewide links to the website and I think that the influx of these links destabilised the website and there was a loss of trust. That lasted for 3 weeks and now the site is back but just off the pace.
This tells me once again that it is possible to undermine a competitors website (albeit short term) with the minimum amount of work, of course you need other factors the toys website has a low inbound link count to start and also is not a trusted site so it was vulnerable.
It seems though that Google worked out what had happened and I can get back to traditional linking practices to try and push the site back onto page 1 and up to a top 3 listing for – childrens toys, this was always the aim of the experiment, getting a low trusted and low ranked site to compete with the big boys. If that can be done it should inspire people to go for it.
