kflanagan - 8:16 am on Sep 18, 2009 (gmt 0)

When I am building links for clients, I am careful not to build them too fast. One my own sites, I am guilty of being too aggressive. But over the past 3 weeks I have seen the following:

1. Affiliate Site 1

I had an affiliate site that I managed to get to 4k uniques in its first 6 weeks. This was off the back of two keywords. Around week 12 I seemed to get penalized for them. My site doesn't rank anywhere for those keywords. It still ranks for others and all pages are indexed. I had about 100 links. The majority with those keywords.

2. Affiliate Site

I stuck up an affiliate site in mid August, built around 70 links and had it ranking top 3 for two keywords. Around 1k uniques for a month. Just this week I got pulled for those keywords.

3. Client Site

I have a client site that I was being quite slow in building links. I built maybe 20 or 30 for a particular keyword but that page no longer ranks for that keyword. It used to be 11

Now, I do not use black hat methods, especially for clients. For affiliate sites, the linking may be aggressive.

My question being, the sites all rank for other keywords. This looks as if its a penalty against a particular keyword. Is the only way around this a re inclusion request from Google ? or for affiliate sites, to start again i.e. those sites will never come back for those keywords ?