40 link pages - all gone supplemental

[promar]

Few days ago about 40 link pages of our site went supplimental.

Link pages are structured as a directory, all categories are on topic, all pages are manually developed, every link was reviewed before publishing, each page has unique Title, description and keywords, there are not more than 25 outbound links per page.

On the other hand, all links are reciprocals and every page contains "links" in URL, Title, description and keywords. Furthermore, there is almost nothing but links on these pages.

I also noticed that lately Googlebot doens't like us. We are getting a few visits a week comparing with tens of visits a day prior to part of our site went supplimental.

Is there a connection between "link pages" and crawling? What would you do?

Thanks.

[larryhatch]

".. all links are reciprocals .. there is almost nothing but links on these pages."

You might have your answer right there. Two answers really.
Reciprocal links for one thing, lack of content for the other. -Larry

[Halfdeck]

I'd count the number of words I have on a page, not including anchor text. If I get a word count of less than 300, I'd write in more text.

[promar]

Thanks for your input. I should correct myself though.

Each link has a detailed description of a couple of senteses. All of them have been revieed, so there is no "best-of-the-best-of-the-best" alike ones.

So the ancor text/content ratio is about 30/70 if not less.

And again, the links were carefully selected from hundreds of link requests.

Should I add some relatyed content (an article?) to the top of every link page?

[sem4u]

A similar thing has happened on one of my sites. Out of 16 resources pages only 3 are now in the Google index and one of these is supplemental. I have tried adding to the description of the page but I still can't seem to get them back into the index. These links are mostly reciprocals, but one page does have a mix of sites I have linked freely to and reciprocals, and this one isn't in the index either!

[promar]

sem4u,

Do you have word "links" in the URLs?

[sem4u]

No they are all in a keyword-resources.asp format.

However, other sites have all their resources pages still in the index.

[promar]

I thought that it might be the trigger. Looks like it's not.

What are you doing in order to get your resource pages back into index?

I'm changing the titles ("blue widgets links by company name" to "Widget directory - Blue Widgets - Country") as well as cleaning up the content to get read of words "links", "link exchange", "recoprocal links", etc.

Surely, I built those pages with PR on the back of my mind, but the main purpose was to build a quality widget-related directory. An it worked perfectly for a number of years.

[sem4u]

I have tried the following:

1) Added a small amount of text at the top of the page in a paragraph to tell readers and search engines what the page is about.

2) Put more effort and text into the meta description tag - similar to point 1.

3) Put links to all resources pages on the site map.

4) Submitted to Google sitemaps.

I do have the words "exchange links" on each page as I want people to trade links with my site. I might try and clean this up a bit. My titles of the pages read "Company Name - Widget Resources Page".

One thing that I can think of is that this site relies too heavily on reciprocal links, so gaining some new non-recirpocal links may help.

[promar]

I'll also try to add a bit of content to the top of each page.

Unlike yours, all my link pages are on the site map page.

I don't strongly relay on links the site ranks pretty well in our niche.

And we always have different pages with links - to forums, on-topic online resources, authority sites, tools, etc.

Further more, these pages are practically indentical (in structure) to link pages. Well, they are all still indexed and in SERPs.

That's why I thought the "links" in the URLs was the problem.