crobb305 - 2:32 pm on Apr 19, 2011 (gmt 0)

Is anyone seeing sites with a lot of high-quality outbound links getting a free pass from Panda 2.0?

A couple of weeks before I was hit, I did a sitewide link cleanup. After several years, many links were dead, pointed to new/unrelated content, or the site owner had placed a 301 (I though I could improve quality by just eliminating the redirect and link directly to their intended page). I also deleted some links that I thought were poor quality.

I have wondered if I fell into a filter for a period of time while the link profile gets recalculated. I improved about 30% of my outbound links in one day. Hopefully I didn't remove too many. I have also been trying to fit more of my outbound links into context, rater than linking from a "Resources" list. I fear that they could be deemed "paid" links if they fit the mold (or if the site I am linking to was Pandalized -- see my next point).

Since Panda, I've had a feeling that Pandalized sites could now be "bad neighborhoods" and that links to them might be dangerous. I'm talking about the hard-hit sites that I always thought were good quality -- not content hubs. The sites that I link to probably shouldn't have been Pandalized, but they were. Maybe there is some bleed back? If just a few Pandalized pages on your own site can cause a sitewide penalty, what about linking to other Pandalized sites? The penalty effect seems very severe and dramatic, so I can't rule it out.