Allegra nuked links

from 4,700 to 254

[SEOMike]

Our company is a very large player in our niche. Prior to allegra we were middle of page one for our key phrases. After allegra we are bottom of page two / page three. We went from 4,700 links to 254. ATW still reports 4,700, but Google has nuked our backlinks.

Here's the part that bites... one of our competitors now has over 35k links reported! That's way up from before.

Any theroies as to why SO many links were dropped?

[Booselect]

I am quite interested to whether these link are from external/internal/reciprocal/high page rank paid links or other wise.

[valeyard]

Could this be a result of "rel=nofollow"? Links from blogs, Wikipedia, etc?

[hunderdown]

How important is this, though? My site supposedly has 117 links to it. I know there are way more than that out there, and more used to be listed. But I'm ranking better than ever and Google traffic is great. So....

[Seo1]

Hi guys

I wrote an article on this subject ..maybe it is getting to you a little too late..

However for the site that suddenly added 35,000 links I would safely bet they get dumped very soon.

<snip>

Let me know your thoughts.

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 4:42 pm (utc) on Feb. 20, 2005]
[edit reason] please no selfpromo or blog links. [/edit]

[dvduval]

It is basically saying that if your site builds links faster than an authority site in your industry, the search engine will know. I don't go for that at all.

I think there are other factors such as:
1) Age of links
2) Relevancy of links
3) IP address of links (sees similar IPs)
4) Page position (higher may be better)