Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I don't normally watch this stuff, but I've recently seen two situations where something like this has been at play and both times the sites seem to have been hit either with ranking demotions or pr demotions.
Are the networks you're looking at above board with their Whois information and so on?
doesn't help as much, or may even penalize
I suspect so - not 100% sure yet.
To date it seemed to be effecting some sites but not others. I've no idea why some were excluded. Probably the safest thing would be to do some testing on de linking.
Are the networks you're looking at above board with their Whois information and so on?
Given the inconsistent results, I suspect I'm grasping at straws.
On dec 12, Google slammed 7 of the weakest domains. Can't really complain as these weren't money makers and not much effort went into them. They are in the index, and rank for their domain names and super long tail, but little else. Traffic dropped from (very rough) average 50-100 to 0-5 unique per site per day.
On dec 18, they slammed another 12 or so. Same symptoms as previous. These were somewhat stronger, and a couple were good earners, with 500-1000 unique visitors a day from google.
As far as I can tell, they targeted sites that got most of their links from the network, although in the later sweep they did hit 3-5 that had significant percentage of links from others. Could be that most of the links from external sources were older and not much recent.
Fortunately, the strongest and best earners were untouched. I can understand devaluing links within a network, but just a little bothered that a site goes from 1000 uv a day to 4.
I too am contemplating some delinking, or fresh inbounds from outside the network to see if the moneymakers can be brought back to life easily.
[edited by: SEOPTI at 4:55 pm (utc) on Jan. 6, 2009]
His point was as long as the links are on topic it's fine.
I've seen these remarks, plus mention of the network size thresholds, and others by Googlers supporting the same. However, I'm also hearing back from some SEO sceptics, well known to key Googlers with terms like "link farm" and associated "filters ".
So that's why I'm not 100% sure on what are secure guidelines . Again I think testing may reveal different effects for different sites.
- 40 place rise and fall fortnightly/monthly on home page and best key phrase page with network IBLs
- other high ranking page vanishes and in its place (15-20 places down) is another page with some relevance to the term but no network IBLs
Lately however the seesawing became less severe and since end December we've been steady just a little bit below where we were a year ago.
Just before we first got hit we were tweaking some anchors across the network.
We've concentrated on our new site since and left this there as pretty much an experiment. Throughout this time I've changed nothing and added no new links to these pages.
So I think that this is part OOP for links that has worn off over time, but I was also thinking that Google had changed something to do with networks.
- PR
they don't affect
- number of URLs crawled / crawling speed
- number of URLs in the index
- supplemental status
I was trying to get more links from non affiliated sites but it did not help at all. It seems not only the PR from affilated sites is devalued but also the whole domain (some sort of -40 or -60). In this case all links which you have built or which you will build don't count any more, it's a harsh filter for the whole domain.
