So you’ve spent some time building links to your site, only to find out it didn’t really help you much in the SERPs after the link update happened? It is surely frustrating, but there are ways to avoid wasting your time and efforts building links that don’t work by recognizing them even before the update happens.
Look at your backlinks and answer these questions:
1. Yahoo is normally faster at picking up your new links. Do your links get indexed by Yahoo? Which ones of them show as omitted results?
2. Do the sites linking to your site get indexed by Google? Are they in the main SERPs or marked as supplemental results? Does Google show these sites in your backlinks after it picks them up or does it omit them?
3. Does your deep link ratio (link to DLR calculation explanation) change over time? If so, in what direction? How does it relate to the general DLR tendencies in your industry?
4. And of course, while this might sound like common sense, are the sites linking to you topically related to your site?
These are just a few things to analyze, of course there are more factors that influence your rankings (you might want to read the series I did on site evaluation, especially the part on link evaluation). But taking a quick look at these few things can help you keep your link building campaign on the right track and minimize wasting efforts.