Free advice: Get a sitewide link for your competitor and just relax

Google penalizes for too many links

[walkman]

I have ZERO doubt in my mind that "There's almost nothing a competitor can you do to your SERPS" is bull. I got a sitewide text ad (for one of the sites) from which I actually get a lot of traffic that the price ends up less than a cent a click. Very legitimate site too. Guess what happens to my SERPS?

In addition to that, that homepage which used to be cached daily, for the past two weeks has been cached only 2X and I moved way down in the SERPS. Google will "sandbox" or whatever you want to call your site if too many links are there, instead of just ignoring the links (as far as benefit) for x amount of days or months.

So go ahead, invest some cash and knock your competitors off #1, 2 and 3, there's no way of telling who actually paid for the link. Hell, depending on the keyword it may pay to buy links for the entire top ten.

[DerekH]

ZERO doubt?

Ok - it's your call, but you don't convince me....
DerekH

[walkman]

maybe I can't convince you...I am convinced myself. Now I don't think it applies to all sites, and plenty of sites have sitewide links, but maybe they grand-fathered or have a special status. Obviously a link to CNN is not going to affect them.

Several other people have noticed the same in this another forums. Nothing changed but sitewide links and rankings went in the basement.
see message #13
[webmasterworld.com...]

[sean]

Derek, sounds like if you play your cards right, you might get some free links courtesy of walkman. :-) Are you feeling lucky? (I, for one, am NOT).

[olias]

This thought has been amusing me for a while as one of the prime theories for the cause of the 'sandbox' is a site acquiring too many unnatural links too quickly. That means that as you suggest it is possible to knock out competitors by simply giving them sitewide links from one of your own slighlty questionable sites or buying them.

I have even seen evidence that this may be the case from some of my sites I have linked to sitewide that dont have many other links, my feeling is that it should only really affect you if they then account for the majority of your links.

All seems a bit odd though, as i recall it was the update around September 2002 that seriously devalued site wide links and that did quite a good job, but to actually go as far as penalise for it does go against what they have always said that other people cant adversely affect your site rankings. I am still not convinced either way but this does seem a valid concern.

I would gladly accept a bunch of sitewide one way links to some of my sites.

[walkman]

"Derek, sounds like if you play your cards right, you might get some free links courtesy of walkman. :-) Are you feeling lucky? (I, for one, am NOT)."

Someone at another forum is offering a sitewide link on his site with over 100K pages. Go ahead guys ;), Free links!

[cabbie]

I reckon 50000 links from a network will at least get that site a review.
If you have a nest you could easily burn someone else's site which might be shady but at the risk of burning your own nest as well.

i remember once buying all these links from someone elses nest to hide all the links from my nest.:( We were both torched.:)

[danny]

I think there's something in this. My very old, stable site (with pretty much zero SEO done on it) now appears to be afflicted by some kind of penalty where internal links aren't being counted at all. Or something like that.

Some of my book reviews now rank behind "supplemental results" for pages that haven't existed for six months.

It's a bit depressing.

[walkman]

"some kind of penalty where internal links aren't being counted at all. Or something like that... "

Yp, same here. Front page ranks pretty good but it's useless when it comes to making $$, the inside pages are nowhere to be found. Not even those linked from multiple pages included the homepage.

I thought that my PR was zeroed or something (internally for G), that's why the rest didn't rank. Or that the front page was completely ingored and since everything is linked from there, the rest would suffer. I tried with different pages, different paths, getting individual links for those pages, barely any luck.

[moltar]

Does the devaluation go away once you remove those incoming site-wide links?

[gomer]

danny your site experiencing these problems is perfect evidence that Google is broken.

[borisbaloney]

Perfect? Try circumstantial.

[Spine]

I'd say over the past 3 months theres a lot of signs that google is, if not broken, on it's way to becoming crappier than it ever has been since inception.

I think they are loosing control, but that's just a theory.

Relevance is going out the window in some sectors.

[oldskool79]

Lately it's obviousl that Google is taking new measures to eliminate spam sites from their results. Too many people are seeing too many odd or unexplainable drops in the SERPS for this to be all made up. Obviously nobody knows exactly what they have done, but it is clear that *something* is happening.

Unfortunately, it seems that Google has taken this too far and is hurting many legitamite sites in the process. Google's SERPS are pretty bad now -- it takes me 3 or 4 queries to just find what I'm looking for.