JoeHouse - 1:31 am on Aug 2, 2010 (gmt 0)

Well many links came from high pr sites but on the inner pages with no PR, using our chosen anchor text. Also did a bit of comment blogging. The sites with high PR are very respectable however many links were from profile pages etc....I have a lot of friends doing this for their sites as well with no issues at all.

The only other thing I have not mentioned is that we believe the penalty is called a Trademark Submission Penalty because our business name does not show up in the results, but our main keyword phrase which was ranking at number 4 is now at number 50 and all our other keywords not in the top 50.

I am told from a very reliable and respected source that this type of penalty can result from the following:

Multi-domain once a valid strategy involving the purchase of many domains each addressing a separate keyword target, now a penalized offense.

We were using 35 wordpress domains and because these domains display level redundancies, including automation, shared functionality including content etc. this is now a penalty from what I understand. According to Google the usual consequence is at least a trademark suppression and a drop in rankings, which is what has occurred with our main domain.

When I heard this I immediately took down and removed all these domains and its content.

Do you think this may have cause the problem or maybe a combination of both.

Now that I have taken down the wordpress domains and they no longer exist, should I also remove the links we have been building as well over the last 4 months? We obtained approximately 250 links a month on these inner pages of these high PR sites. The links were good but the relevancy was not very good.

We have gone back and reedited all the links to have a wide variety of anchor text (more than 30) with 25% of using our Business name as the anchor text. Also 90% of the links were pointing to the homepage which we changed and now we have moved these links to all deep linking with very little links pointing to the homepage.

Was this a good move, or should I remove all those links as well before I ask for a reconsideration request?