Duplicate links seem to have dropped my position

One link on a chatboard has been replicated 65 times

[gramski]

My page has dropped hundreds of positions on the www2 and www3 search. I've done almost no changes in the past month - just a change from a plural to a singular title. My site is just a single page with a pr2 ranking but the only thing I can see different to past months is that a link to my site put up by a chatboard user somewhere is showing up as 65 separate links. Could this type of duplicate link have caused a penalty somehow?

[daamsie]

hi gramski and welcome to Webmaster World. I am noticing a similar thing where backlinks from a site that has a link to our site on most of their pages (some 300) have dropped this month considerably (to about 5!) - this could explain the drop of about 250 in my total backlinks.. maybe this is one of the new filters GG was talking about..

[gramski]

I admit I know almost nothing about search engine rankings but it seems incredible to me that a site can be pushed way down in the rankings by someone on a dodgy site somewhere linking to it.

It seems if its that easy to manipulate a google ranking that competitors would have no trouble arranging it. Last month this site was at #1 in the plural keyword and #16 in the singular keyword on google and now its way down hundreds of rankings.

Its just gone up to very near the top at MSN and All the Web yet google has dumped it.

[rfgdxm1]

>I've done almost no changes in the past month - just a change from a plural to a singular title.

widgets!= widget. As much as apples!= oranges. These are TOTALLY different and unrelated to Google. If you want to score well for "apples" on Google, being well optimized for "apple" is 100% worthless.

[gramski]

Yes its true that apple/apples is hugely different but in the keywords I use there really is no difference in meaning it is just singular or plural.

The change from plural to singular made a very slight improvement on the other search engines so I am thinking that the difference I am seeing right now is something else. I read on another thread that low ranked sites like my pr2 don't always show up in the early stages of a google update - or is that just false hope?

[WindSun]

To Google, apple and apples are two different words. I have seen wildy different results on our keywords on a few minor pages, although on most it makes little difference.

[starec]

Could this type of duplicate link have caused a penalty somehow?

Not really. Every dmoz link gets duplicated hundred times by all the dmoz-clones, with no adverse effect on ranking. The same happens with links on mirrored sites.
From here it looks like Google algo is smart enough to ignore this type of link duplicity.