Penalty for adding too many backlinks too soon? What to do?

[chaosas]

I recently started a new forum and I think I went overboard with adding backlinks - too many, and too soon. It's nothing too crazy though - I merely added links to it from a few blogs, forum signatures, and submitted it to a few directories. I think the main reason is that it's a new domain.

A few days ago it was ranking #4 for it's main keyword and climing the SERPs steadily; now it's ranked at like #74 for that keyword. Also when searching for the adress, it's directory listings are shown higher than the actual site - bad, bad sign :(

What exactly should I do in this situation? Is this some sort of manual penalty, or just an automatic filter I triggered? Will it go away with time, if I just wait and my forum gets new content?

[tedster]

What you need is a natural backlink profile - and what will help the most is those freely given, editorial backlinks that YOU don't place. Good content is what you need to attract that kind of proflie.

How recently did this forum begin? This may not be a penalty at all. New websites often begin with some strong rankings that go away, only to grow back slowly and more organically. That early period seems like a kind of testing period. Sometimes, if a site really catches fire and generates a real buzz on the web, the rankings do not go away - but that is rather rare.

[chaosas]

That's the thing, it's only about a week old so I don't think it's because of the so-called 'Google honeymoon' effect ending suddenly. I guess Google doesn't like when completely new domains with little content suddenly acquire a lot of backlinks? Does that kind of penalty even exist?

I probably shouldn't have done what I did, but it's too late. What should I do to fix this? Remove all backlinks? Simply wait? (The backlinks are in 'real' webpages, by the way. I own other MMORPG forums in my language; also some MMORPG blogs in English, so I just went ahead and linked from there, almost as soon as I finished setting up my forum).

I forgot to mention it's a localized website in my own language so the competition is *tiny*. Yet even pages which are barely related to my main keyword are shown above my website in SERPs. Also when searching for domain.com, it doesn't show up first in search results, so it does look like a penalty to me :(

[tedster]

I guess Google doesn't like when completely new domains with little content suddenly acquire a lot of backlinks? Does that kind of penalty even exist?

Well, it is mentioned in a recent patent, although the exact details of the calculation are not public.

While a spiky rate of growth in the number of back links may be a factor used by search engine 125 to score documents, it may also signal an attempt to spam search engine 125. Accordingly, in this situation, search engine 125 may actually lower the score of a document(s) to reduce the effect of spamming.

Google's Recent Historical Data Patent [patft.uspto.gov] (USPTO)