Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have a site which got hit on sept 22 Jagger1 and never came back. I believe that I went a bit too crazy with link building and built like 500 links per month for the months of August-Oct. Prior to Jagger1 my site was on page1 and now dropped to page 80 or so for my major keywords. Site is a Pr6 still and several thousand backlinks.
What I need to know is a couple of things.
1. I believe a lot of other sites had same issues but no one ever mentioned if they ever got their site back where it used to be?
2. What speed of building links per month is a safe one. Dont tell me 20 because keywords I am trying to optimize are very competitive and 20 links per month wont do it even in 5 years.
3. So if someone was hit and got it back. Did it come back to exactly where it used to be or even higher and how many links were acquired from the time it got hit and then got back to its original rankings. Please specify monthly or weekly speed.
4. How long it took since the site got penalized and got back? Can it come back in next update example if a site got hit in Jagger1 and say link building since then has been slowed to less than 50. Can I expect it to be back in next update? Or is it gonna be several updates till I would have to wait.
Could someone please share their experiences?
ALso being PR4 from 1 link I doubt if ANY of those sites come to that criteria from those 600 that are linking to my site. Most of them are having like 300-800 unique backlinks and ranging from PR4 to PR6. Links are not from spam sites but infact from good established sites!
NO!
just kidding...
I got hit around August 2005, and lost plenty of indexed pages. I reasoned that if I linked to each page from my other site things would get better. Big mistake. By March 1st, I had removed all links, re-did everything, and my site came back around June. I assume that Google took a month or so to spider the pages that had linked me so I'd say about 2 month after Google found out that the links are gone. Of course, as I said before, this could've just been a coincidence and the site would have come back regardless.
The links were spread across 35 anchor texts so I believe that is variety enough.How are your positions for keyword combinations other than the 35 different anchor text combos? If your positions are still good for other keyword combos outside of those 35, then maybe you should try considerably lowering the keyword density on your pages for those "35 achor text" terms.
It is difficult to find 900 really quality and related sites, so you should be able to descern the difference between very related sites and not as related sites (for example links to all inclusive directories)
Writing and distributing articles with different anchors pointing into the site and not at the root may help google as well.
What I did was to stop linking altogether. I stopped reciprocal links. I removed the Add URL page. I removed links that are marginally related to our site and only retained those that are really on-topic.
Then I embarked on different ways of getting backlinks. I issued almost weekly press releases. I submitted articles to other sites.
I got back my traffic end-December. Traffic is even higher now.
500 links per month
my problem with that statement is, that i can see no reason, why that should be punished? If I want to kick you out, I just put a link on my 1,500 domains network and you are gone? hard to believe?
that must come hand in hand with another critieria...
p!
I was talking of the links that we are making from our website to other websites. That one we stopped000. If we have to make a link nowadays (for press release submissions), we put rel=nofollow command to make sure Google does not follow them.
"Contained" internal linking.
Minimum network crosslinking.
Moderate recips, strictly on topic.
Remove AdSense.
Would be a start.....
Any ideas on what number would it be? I am thinking 50 or less as MAX.
The other elements are dead on though:
50 recip links per month max and very strictly relevant.
Focus on quality sites only, and ones who do categorized on topic exchanges. Stay away from sites who link out from the homepage to completely unrelated sites without using noindex nofollow/
Only link with sites who have some pr at root, but do 'bookmark' quality related sites to trade with once they do recieve pr (to verify they are not banned or penalized)
Crosslinking should be very little, and if used, should also use a noindex nofollow tag.
Hope this helps
IMO perceived intent is a factor in G determining a linkage pattern is a links scheme, and in such cases AS may well be seen as a/the motive.
In trying to get a site re-included, it's reasonable to eliminate the possible motive behind the original infraction, at least temporarily.
What can make it to look more natural to search engines from now onwards.
"Looking more natural" is still artificial, isn't it?
If you've been penalized for an artificial linking scheme, wouldn't you expect Google to be on the alert for any pattern that's in the least bit suspect? You've already been caught once, so why would Google give you the benefit of the doubt?
IMO perceived intent is a factor in G determining a linkage pattern is a links scheme.
Very true, however adsense in itself has absolutely nothing at all to do with linking perse. There are many high quality sites who have never asked or chased links doing well in the serps
I have two hobby sites that are large where I never reciprocated links for. Both use adsense effectively, and both weren't touched by any update in the last years.
"Looking more natural" is still artificial, isn't it?
Not necessarily. It's perfectly natural for webmasters to want to promote their websites, after all.
Cultivate links that make good sense to human visitors, and everything else will tend to fall into place.
People downloaded the skin -> I got credits for it (backlinks) -> and now I´m filtered or penalized for having to many links in a short time.
I do not feel Lucky :-(
You raise an excelent point, how does one compete with established websites in highly lucrative areas that have been around since the 90s? I don't think you can in Google. It's sort of like asking how you can compete with General Motors, unless you're Honda or some similarly large automaker, forget about it.
I know of another site that just purchased over 90,000 run of site links on a large and well known directory (usually is mentioned in the top 15 in terms of quality, pagerank, pages spidered, etc). I would have thought that would result in sandboxing. Nope. They are more competitive than ever in their niche.
Can a lot of new links sandbox you? I personally wouldn't want to put it to the test, but I have to wonder.
Can a lot of new links sandbox you? I personally wouldn't want to put it to the test, but I have to wonder.
Depends I guess. I have evidence from my own sites that this is the case (Sanboxed) at least if the site has few links from the start.
One of my sites had less than 30 links and ranked top 10 for many relevant keywords. I got 300 links during a couple of month and dropped in rankings after that. Now 6 month later I see some recovery.
P.S. I did not buy those links they "came of the free will" from other sites. I feel a little disappointed when it comes to Google. I do not feel Lucky :-(.
The longer the site is in the google index with links i the place, the more links one can acquire without suffering as much of a penalty or filter if you will for link spam.
New sites are watched every carefully. All Google does is checks the length of the domain. If your site is only a month old and already has 100 links to it, this could represent some kind of attempt to inflate rankings by links....
What would those links look like?
I can gurantee that if you get 500 links a month then the links will come from all kinds of webpages. When people link exchange most people think that changing links with a website with no PR is a bad thing. I think it's not.
Think natural and it will work out. It's not natural to have 300 external links from one websites that points to all kinds of webpages. These webpages are all linking back to another website.
I belive that the dumbest of bots can see this pattern.
I don't believe that 100's of links per month is going to do a darn thing. That's the old bowling theory. You could be knocked out by any competitor who in some way directs hundreds / thousands of links at your site and you're history.
You can pick up hundreds of IBL's just in normal marketing. I sell products for college kids and purchase advertising on .edu .org sitewide to my product pages. I sell survival gear and purchase lots of ads (text link ads) on Military related sites and. That's advertising, relevant and "natural" in the business world.
Maybe you got "hammered" for the variable in this problem - and that would be that some or many of those links were obtained at the price of a reciprocal OBL and a chunk, going to to irrelevant sites. Somewhere you hit the barrier of outbounds, and triggered something, or flat out - didn't check out some of the sites you linked to - the way we're dis-secting it now, and got busted in "Link Farm"ing country. Somewhere in the outbound links aways seems to be where a site gets in trouble.
That's how it's always appeared to me - opinions vary. Good luck and hope you get straightened out soon!
