Google removed all but trusted incoming links

How do I tell if a site has been reported?

[lesliet]

A client has hired me to determine if her site has been sabotaged or reported for linkspamming. Is there any type of list out there that can tell me this? Yahoo and MSN show 1000+ incoming links and Google and AOL only show 10. Her pagerank is zero. I don't have any history on the site, but she's reporting her rankings have slipped terribly.

I know she wasn't banned because her site has over 900 pages indexed in Google.

Any insight is appreciated!

[CainIV]

A client has hired me to determine if her site has been sabotaged or reported for linkspamming

Im not entirely sure what you mean by sabotaged. Did your client have pagerank previously? did they lose this, and on what day. When did her rankings slip? Did they slip in all the major engines?

Google does not show many of the backlinks to a site, Yahoo and MSN are both more accurate.

We would need more information to try and even evaluate why her rankings slipped as there are alot of variables.

[Wizard]

Google and AOL only show 10

You're not saying about the link: command, are you? It has been discussed for over a year that it doesn't show much reliable information.

[lesliet]

Here's what she's told me and keep in mind, I was just hired so the history I'm getting from client.

She noticed her rankings slide in Nov 05.
The site has hundreds of pages indexed in Google.
Some keywords are page 1, most others are not.
Using the link: command in G and other engines is how I'm seeing the lack of inbound links in G, but not in Yahoo and MSN.

She's wondering if one of two things happened:
a)a competitor reported her site for linkspamming
b)her current seo firm got her site involved in a link farm (he's not admitting to it) and then she got penalized during the Jagger update

Again, these are just theories on her part and I'm trying to help find her answer, which is pretty much like looking for a needle in a haystack.

[colin_h]

My Advice would be to rebuild and then write to google and ask for another parse with this in mind. Hundreds of us spent most of last year in the same predicament and we got absolutely nowhere theorising over what may have happened. Your client needs to know that they are not alone and that most of us redesigned in some way to get out of the problem.

You should analyse their site, look for area's that can be improved. Remove anything spammy and look to incorporate duplicated content. The only way that you can be confident in your work is when you create it ... if you have to keep working with other people's mistakes, you will eventually be blamed by this buck passing client [IMHO].

All the Best

Col :-)

[tedster]

The advice you've been given so far sounds good to me -- the Google link: operator is not intended to show anything more than a sampling of links.

She noticed her rankings slide in Nov 05

Sounds like Update Jagger, part 3. You might want to study the observations people made at that time (and for Jagger parts 1 and 2) -- [webmasterworld.com...] is one place to start.

[Phil_Payne]

The link: operator is interesting - perception and myth says that Google only show a sampling, but in at least one place on Google's own site it says "comprehensive".

In my case - none at all. It shows only internal links and occasionally one external - always the same one.

I actually have several hundred inbound external links, all of which have been EARNED - i.e., they're all journals (The Register, The Inquirer, Computer Weekly, ComputerWoche, even the BBC) that have referred to my work. None has been obtained via purchase or link exchange or any other kind of SEO activity, but Google still lists none of them. Both Lycos and Yahoo do.

But - it seems to make no difference and I'm right where I want to be for the search terms I'm interested in. When it first happened it worried me a bit, but Google seems to be coping with it.