aok88 - 10:44 pm on Feb 21, 2008 (gmt 0)

I think I have found something interesting:

I am friends with a competitor of mine, and one of his sites just got de-listed by Google on the same day as us. So we started looking at commonalities, and the one thing we found was that we both purchased links from one particular computer website.

So we looked at the other 13 links in the footer where our links were on this site (and it was obvious that all the links were text link ads), and 10 of the 15 websites ALSO were de-indexed from Google.

Now, could that be a coincidence? No way. In fact, doing a search for our two websites, the only site that came up in the Google SERPs was this damn site we had the links on.

Also, the company that does the advertising for this computer website is an SEO company, and they have had problems with Google before which I discovered by doing a search.

If it is true that this site that had 10 outbound links to sites that are all out of the Google index (which is highly unusual), then 1 bad site that points to you can indeed knock you out. Of course, this may be a special case where they targeted this SEO company and sites that were associated with it.

So, were we knocked out of the index programatically/algorithmically or manually?