sublime1 - 12:01 am on Jun 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

seoArt -- can you be more specific as to what "excessive cross-linking" might mean?

We have a site that, in the last several weeks, got nuked. All last week, all of our several hundred pages are either not in google at all, or are there but not indexed (site:www.mysite.com shows only the URL, no title, description). By now, almost every page in the site has been affected this way, and, of course, we're getting no traffic at all. Our other site (on a different domain, using the same strategy) seems completely unaffected.

Our home page was PR8 (and apparently still is, though who knows...); we had lots of good content: yes, we do what we can to get ranked appropriately, but we really felt our site provides value that no other site in our area does. We got lots of traffic and lots of happy customers. We have been around for a year and a half and everything has just been getting better. Our site is not spam; it's really good content some of which we create and some of which we synopsize and aggregate and link from other authority sites. Cutstomers love it and find it a resource that allows them to buy with confidence. Or did. Now, we're gone.

As far as we can tell, our only transgression was that we had a navbar (on every page) that linked to the major pages in the site. It had links to each of the major searches, and to the most popular "widgets". This was a lot of links, perhaps over 100 that resided on each page. We added links we though people would find interesting.

We also had a corporate home page on a different domain that had only one page, and which replicated this navbar. We think this was our bad move. In effect, our navbar promoted the two domains our company currently runs, and provided some general information about the company. Also, each page on the three sites (nuked, corporate and other) had a footer that pointed to the home pages in our little network. Could this be enough?

Does this count as "cross linking"? We have, of course, since removed all links between any of our three domains. But the nuking continues; the only pages that still remain in the index are the pages that never had links to them, for example, search pages sorted a special way, or our 2003 holiday buying info. It sure looks likes anything that had a link from our site got killed. We're sure when PR is recalculated we'll have gotten a PR0.

The only other thing we recently discovered is that several of the links we had on our links page were to sites that appear to have been blacklisted. They looked fine to us when we agreed to link to them. They're gone now, but it was only a couple of sites amongst perhaps 100 (relevant) sites we linked to.

I guess we're still just in shock -- we thought we were taking the high road and doing everything we could to be good citizens.

Were we naive? Or could something else be going on?

TIA