Minus 100 Penalty - for aggressive link exchange?

[Thaparian]

I have noticed this on 3 of my sites.

Before 15th July, these three sites were ranking for their primary keywords in TOP 20.

Then these sites dropped on 16-17 July to 11th page of serps.

These sites bounced back to normal rankings 2 days ago, and now back to 11th page.

Anybody else noticed this?

I think these sites dropped cos i did aggressive link exchange lately. I did link exchange with relevant sites though.

[tedster]

This sounds like an example of the Yo-Yo Effect [webmasterworld.com] - and I really thank you for your honesty about the aggressive link exchange being a possible cause.

However, I'm not sure it's of much value to to identify a "-100" penalty or any other particular number, these days. Even the classic -30 and -950 penalties no longer show their characteristic "number".

For some people a penalty begins with a drop of one page. For others it can be 3 pages or 5 pages or 50 pages. I doubt that we'll ever penetrate any logic for the numbering scheme, or that the numbering scheme will even stay stable for very long.

[Whitey]

cos i did aggressive link exchange lately

Sounds like link issues are a key factor in upsetting stability if they are coming in from the wrong places or too quickly acquired .

I presume you mean "reciprocal linking". Can you indicate how aggressive you believe the link exchange to be?

[Thaparian]

I did link exchange with around 7-8 sites in one day. Some of the sites are mine only.

[edited by: Thaparian at 12:21 pm (utc) on Aug. 5, 2008]

[rowtc2]

You have made sitewide or one page - to one page link exchange ?
Was image or text links ?
Links as removed after the penalty and from which date ?

[Thaparian]

All links were sitewide.

Is sitewide link exchange with a relevant site bad?

Text links, with anchor text same as page title.

Links were removed after 2 days, my sent went down. I didn't made any changes, it went up, again went down.

[potentialgeek]

Google is very aggressive against intra-site linking schemes. I recently removed all competitive keywords in anchor text--completely stripped down and replaced with neutral words or numbers--and got to #1 in SERPs.

p/g

[Thaparian]

One should do site wide link exchange or single page link exchange?

Also if i wish to link out to some quality relevant site, should i give the link on all pages or make a links page?