Network ban / too many ourbound links?

[dgrand]

Hello,

I run serveral websites on one server. All of them offer widgets, with one main "allwidgets" and others are subcategories "redwidgets", "bluewidgets", et..
Total is 8 categories, all sites are hosted in one IP.
Each site is (was) crosslinked to another.

After the recent link update traffic went down 80%. The PR is still showing on all sites but they are nowhere to be found on google SE results.

Did I get penalized by Google algorithm? If yes, what would be the penalty for?

Should I only link from main site to subcategories sites?

Also the sites have significant amount of outbound links (thousands - per each product) and not so many incoming. PR is fine. Could Google penalize for many outbound links?

DG

[BroadProspect]

same happened to me, anyone have an answer?
/BP

[troels nybo nielsen]

A belated welcome to WebmasterWorld, dgrand.

Google are tweaking their algo all the time. A change that may look as a penalty for some kinds of pages very often just is a shifting of weight in the algo so that some factors count less and others count more.

Some of my own pages recently made a drop (typically from #5 to #15) and I interpret this as just a change in the algo so that some of the qualities of my websites do not longer give me the benefits that they used to. And interlinking does indeed seem to be one of them.

Linking for the sake of boosting a page is in my opinion a dangerous practice. It might be a good idea for you to carefully check all links on your websites and consider if they are useful for human visitors. I believe that this is the ultimate test for the validity of a link, and I believe that Google are trying to make their algo best possibly suited for checking this.

Having many outbound links should not be any problem if those links point to good and relevant pages.

[Palehorse]

I run a directory with over 100 thousand outbounds...

PR6 and no problems.

[Schneewittchen]

@dgrand, i think all u need are more inbound links for all sites from other pages with the same topic. if your sites have only your own backlinks from the same ip it is possible G drop you from the index for bad neighborhood / unnatural linking structure. i think thats not a good idea from G: webdesigners they have a link to his references or a small business with more than 1 topic...they are all automatically on G's blacklist.....that isnt fair. it cant be: a search engine require links from competitions for good listing, i think that is the greatest **** ever. many webmasters didnt hear from florida or bad neighborhood and have good listings since many years - and today they ask what is wrong....Large companies become still larger and small companies didnt have a chance in googls serps. thats business.

[DoppyNL]

Could be that you will be up in a couple of days.
A site of mine was hit 4 days ago and dropped to the bottom of the results, today it's back where it was.

I would give each site it's own IP though, reduces the chance that Google will mark it as spamming.

and ofcourse, get more inbound links.
You can keep linking between those site's as they are all related. Do make sure they all got enough content of their own!

[Schneewittchen]

LOL, now webmasters get for each project another webspace or dedicated server, only why G means it is spam to crosslink all pages... what a dishonor. it looks like micro$oft's kind of business.