Pancho - 5:21 pm on Apr 30, 2007 (gmt 0)

Hello everybody, it's my first post in this forum...

I'm stucking in -950-something-penalty too. I set a footerlink from my forum to my buisiness-domain - six weeks later I found my site in nowhere land...

Since there are a lot of sites stucking in this issue, one can't be sure to find the exact reason for that, but too much links with the same phrase sounds reasonable.

The penalty works for the "harder" keywords only, not for the entire site - but not just for the keyword used in the footerlink, and that's why I'm still in doubt about the responsibility of the footerlink for that trip to 950++. For some keywords and phrases there are no changes at all - they're still on top and were never away.

The whole thing started about two months ago, the site was away for about five days, then returned for about a week - disapeared again for about two weeks and came back again - and so on...

Now my site is away from top positions for some two weeks while sites optimized for some less important phrases as I mentioned above never left their top positions.

My site is quite a small one (54 pages) and about three years old / for the last 2 years always within top ten search results.

I'm now not sure what to do...
The footerlink pointing to one of my subfolders is still in place, because I don't want to turn things even worse - since there are many reports of sites coming back without having changed anything.

Would you remove the footer link, or just wait for what is happening the next weeks?

Will this penalty be removed than or is my site now marked as "bad" and will the removing of the link prove that there really was an intention to play some kind of game with google?

The entire site is absolutely "white", ther are no "black" tricks or something.

Thank you for your answers...

Pancho

I tried hard to use my best english, since I'm from Germany there maybe still a lot of mistakes, I appologize for that...

[edited by: Pancho at 5:26 pm (utc) on April 30, 2007]