Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'm not gonna lie, I have our interns working 2-3 hours per day finding related sites to swap links with and so on. The problem is the program we use adds each link to all sites, so generally speaking each of out sites' link pages look very close to identical. Ironically, each site is PR5 with link pages of PR2-4.
Does Google notice? If so, is then penalty steep? Assuming Google notices, and I would like to proactively differentiate the sites, could I just reorder the links on each site and produce enough of a difference?
In other words, does Google only detect order changes (i.e. 12345 --> 32154) or are they smart enough to know that even though the order is the different that the content is the same (12345 = 25413, just in a different order)?
We lost a couple of sites last week (SERPs disappeard and PR went to 0) though we think it's because Google applied a filter and is going to roll it back (we're seeing page cached dates on sites that don't belong to us in the 2003-2004 area; this happened to us once before in January and they fixed it so we're not worried). My only concern is the fact that I got an email the day before it happened and the author mentioned that he wanted me to remove a link from my sites because a new Google algo was going to start penalizing people for having links from network sites on the same page. This led us to examine:
(1) where OUR links are on other people's sites;
(2) how our link pages are structured, since they each share anywhere from 75% to 92% of the same content.
Does anyone think this matters? Has anyone heard anything about this supposed new Google algo or is this person just nutz?
