Is This a Penalty

A little input please

[paulb1]

Hi, my website used to have a pr5 and 200+backlinks, then in december i obtained a pr0 and google was showing know backlinks anymore and my site dropped to i don't know where, then in the january update my site recovered to a pr3 which it is at the moment but google is still showing know backlinks, if i do a search for my domain name it comes up so it's still in google's database, Do you think this is a penalty?

Oh by the way i have know spam, hiddenlinks or anything spammy on my pages!

[Chicago]

how did you get the 200 backlinks?

[edited by: Chicago at 12:59 am (utc) on Mar. 7, 2003]

[msr986]

What about your outgoing links? Were you linking to a "bad neighborhood"?

[paulb1]

I haven't changed my title or content, i don't understand it was fine for 9months doing really well and suddenly bang my site is know where to be seen, i got my 200+ links by doing link exchanges and some people just linked to my site!
There was one site who was higher than me in the serps who i was linking to but is website got banned from google for crosslinking, so i removed is link!

[yetanotheruser]

What about your outgoing links?

And how many pages is your site?

--> i got my 200+ links by doing link exchanges and some people just linked to my site!
edit: ah.. nevermind then ;) that answers my question :)

[edited by: yetanotheruser at 1:13 am (utc) on Mar. 7, 2003]

[Tartan75]

what sort of sites were you doing link exchanges with - were they on topic content sites, or were they link farms/bad neighbourghoods?

Did you remove the link to the banned site before or after it was banned - if after thats probably your answer.

[paulb1]

I removed the link to the banned site after it was taken out of google's index, i have seven pages on my website and about 200+ outgoing links, all the websites i exchange links with are on topic with my site!

[Tartan75]

you linked to a site which was banned. Im no expert on the effect that has, but i suspect that may have caused your problems.

If you are confident your site conforms 100% to googles requirements, are you confident each and every site you link to conforms 100% to googles requirements? If not then thats a problem for you.

[mbennie]

Is it possible that the sites who link to you fell below a PR4 and caused your own drop in PR?

When you do a check on alltheweb do you find all 200 links?

[paulb1]

I suppose that would not only be a problem for me but to every one that does link exchanges, if my site has a penalty wouldn't it stay at a pr0 instead of going backup to a pr3, oh and i forgot to mention all my internal pages have a pr0 while before they were a pr5!

When i do a check on alltheweb i get about 250 links showing, know it's not possible all the pages linking to me have fell below a pr4

Thanks for your help so far guys!

[Night_Hawk]

>>you linked to a site which was banned

He linked to a site that was indexed by Google, it was not band when he linked to it.

Do you think Google will penelize a site that has a link to another site which has trouble with Google at later time? if that is the case, google should change that.

You are my friend as long as i know you are a good person, but when you start cheating I might change that and you are not my friend anymore, and that is the same case with
paulb1.

I have to read the source code line by line to find out if a site is spamming or not before i link to it.