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I have a question, and would like as much feedback as possible. I have several niche sites, where traffic and income was going great, until July 4th, when Yahoogle Updated. As for recently, I noticed my sites are a PR3, they might have been a PR5 before, not sure, because didn't pay much attention or understand Google's PR ratings until this last week, of doing research. I have several non-niche sites, which have links showing up in google, when I search for info:www.non-niche-sites.com, and then click on the link, link. And several links show up that are linking to my site. And I did this for the other non-niche sites, and I came up with the same result. As for my niche sites, I do the process of finding links, and no luck what so ever. It shows none, where I know there are links out there linked to my site, because I have used google before to see where my links were coming from.
What could this be a result from? Is google punshing me? Because last week, Thursday July 4th. My Yahoo placement dropped from Spot 3 for my keyword where I have been for a few months to ummm I can't even count that high. I haven't seen the Yahoogle update today, so not sure if its fixed or not. But, this is concerning me, and I am curious what you might have to say about this. I know there is a chance where I might have been punished, where I know I have to email help@google.com and ask them. But, I would like to hear what you have to say first. Because I don't want to go all out, and ask them, "are you punishing my sites: site1.com, site2.com, site3.com, site4.com ?" Any suggestions in what might be going on, and what I should do?
It looks like you have been struck by a version of this penalty. Are all you internal pages still showing good page rank or are they PR0. If the latter then you are almost certainly under a penalty probably for too much crosslinking or link farming.
I suggest that you try delinking one of the sites from any of your other sites and see whether it recovers.
You said that your sites are PR3 now. If the keywords you are targeting are competitive at all, then you will likely have a tough time ranking with a PR3.
For moderately competitive keywords, a page with PR3 and PR4 can bounce around in the rankings a lot as each month Google tweaks their algorithm. Get more inbound links to boost your PR.
You also said you know that you have inbound links, but that you can't see them with the "link" search. If the inbound links are from PR3 pages or lower, then they won't show up in that search (though they are still being counted for PR purposes).
2. If you had new site posted and google crawled for the first time the bot normally crawls very few pages the first time. This will give you a green googlebar which is actually only a "guessament" to PageRank. As google doesn't penalize sites for being new (it knows very little about you) it tend to inflation PR.
3. If you original had PR5 on page the google visited pages would have been indicated as backlinks, and if your guessament PR5 is gone and PR now below PR4 the backlinks would disappear as well.
As to site1.com, site2.com, site3.com, site4.com actually being penalize. As long as you do not heavily crosslink between these sites there shouldn't be a problem.
1. Crosslinking for ownership (main pages are link from all pages is ok, or
2. crosslinking to avoiding duplicating content (you have "example" a demo page on the primary site and the other 3 sites link to this page for access to the demo - this is good.
pages that have identical content on each should not be linked together - if you avoid this google will be fine.
Check the URL in my sticky to see a good 4 site link strategy
I saw your original post but there are many people with more knowledge on this subject than me. A little tip for future threads, try and put a more descriptive title on them.
Brett has some examples he lists in the coloured area under the form for posting, I pasted them here. There is an explanation in that section as to why as well.
Real Examples as seen on the board before:
Good: "Google started to update today". - Not Good: "I am so lucky".
Good: "How do I ask for recip links?" - Not Good: "They won't do it!"
A better title may have gotten a quicker response, people sometimes pass over a thread when it has a non descript title. Just trying to help a little, and again
welcome to the boards.
