Link exchange went wrong?

[laughingeyes]

I run a fairly popular (~100,000 unique visitors per day) website that recently lost all of its Google rankings. The site is as clean as it gets: no SEO employed - there was no need to have it, as the site was doing pretty well without any optimization.

Having done everything possible to make sure that the site is within the Guidelines and having submitted a number of reconsideration requests (did not work for me), I figured out that the only thing that might be the reason for penalization is a several of recent link exchanges.

I exchanged links with some other popular sites < on the same topic > (real bad popular, alexa rank within 1,000 - 2,000) and immediately after that the traffic dipped.

Would you give me your opinion on the following?
- Am I right thinking that Google considers those links spammy? If so, why rankings of my link partners are not affected? Such exchanges are very common and can be found on 8 out of 10 popular sites < in this market >.
- I made these link exchanges to exchange visitors, not to get SEO benefits. Would placing nofollow tags help restore the ranking? If so, should I ask the link partners to place the nofollow tag on the links pointing to my site?
- Do you have any experience with removing link exchanges having positive effect on ranking?

[edited by: tedster at 5:34 am (utc) on Feb. 9, 2009]

[tedster]

You say this is a reciprocal link with some other sites. Have you checked them all out to be sure that Google isn't penalizing one of them - seeing them as a "bad neighborhood"? If you pass PR to someone who is up to shady tactics, that can reflect poorly on your site. So a rel="nofollow" on your side might be in order, if you have any doubts about a target site.

It is also possible that Google sees one of these backlinks as a paid link - they are trying to automate that process and it might throw a false positive - especially if any of those sites either do or did sell links. If all you want is the traffic anyway, then rel="nofollow" on the links would eliminate that possibility.

[edited by: tedster at 6:54 pm (utc) on Feb. 9, 2009]

[laughingeyes]

tedster,

I am absolutely positively sure that the link exchanges did not negatively affect my link partners: as per both alexa and quantcast, their traffic slightly increased. I also see them ranked very well in the SERPs.

It is definitely possible that there was a false alarm and those exchanges were marked as paid links. I addressed this issue by filing a reconsideration request and explaining my reasongs. No result.

Anyway, any human would not consider those links to be spammy. Links look like this:
mysite.com/red_widgets_user_reviews.html
<->
theirsite.com/red-widgets-user-reviews.html
anothersite.com/red.widgets.user.reviews.html

With anchor text like this: "Read more <link>reviews on Red Widgets</link> at theirsite.com"

I updated the links with nofollow tag, let the partners know, and will file another reconsideration request tomorrow.

The bad thing is that even if my site would get un-penalized, it will probably not have chances for such lucrative exchanges anymore. Both theirsite.com and anothersite.com are super popular, and I assume their will not want to risk their rankings.

[tedster]

How long ago did your rankings dry up?

[laughingeyes]

Bit less than a month ago.

[tedster]

Well, that's long enough that it's not likely to be a bug. What have you considered in addition to the link exchange? For instance, does your site offer enough distinctive value in your particular niche to set it apart from others of the same kind?

I'm thinking here that you may have received a human evaluation, especially if the new backlinks caught the attention of the algo.