Years old directory penalized - lost PR and traffic, but why?

[Romac34]

OK, Ive probably done something wrong. As my flagship website lost its pagerank and gets no more traffic from Google. It's a link directory with thousands of pages of good informational links and received over 3000 visits a day.

I recently decided to move this site to my own server.
I also send a message to Google that some nut was clicking my Adsense links like crazy and that I had banned him from the site. But could these things have caused loss of pagerank and traffic?

Why would Google all off a sudden decide that this site that has been around for years is not worth sending traffic to?

[anallawalla]

How many pages are now indexed in Google? Is this more or less than before?

I would not connect AdSense fraud with a ranking penalty. At worst your AdSense account will be nuked. After all, if one person is clicking your pages then he or she won't need a search engine to find those pages.

[tedster]

Some areas I'd want to examine are:

1. Link rot - either growing numbers of 404 links or degeneration of some target urls into a bad neighborhood

2. Pages that are heavy on links and very light on unique text

3. Other indications that links are included without editorial discrimination

4. Any whiff of link buying/selling - either on your directory or for acquiring your backlinks.

#4 has been moving from human editorial input to algorithmic decisions, and there may be some false positives triggered - so think about how it looks, and not just what you really do/did.

[Romac34]

I used to have close to 5000 links indexed. This morning its down to 1900, steadily decreasing the last few days.
The pages consist of meta data of sites with a link to the site. Also the site is categorized on topics. I don't sell any links, never have.

For what Adsense is concerned, as of this morning clicks aren't being registered anymore. My stats are stuck on 7 dollars and something. Normally by the time I'm writing this I'd be on 70 dollars or so, and before my site got penalized I'd be at 150 - 170 by now.

Are their automated ways off finding out if you are linking to bad sites? I have close to a million links there are bound to be some bad links among them. How can I weed them out?
I also added Boonex Dolphin, Pligg news site and Esyndicat directory script the last few weeks. Could any of these be the cause perhaps?

[tedster]

For identifying lins to bad sites, try finding the ones that don't show as #1 for a search on their own domain name - the[example.com] search. You might be able to automate that yourself with some scripting and build a much smaller list for manual insepction.

I also added Boonex Dolphin, Pligg news site and Esyndicat directory script the last few weeks. Could any of these be the cause perhaps?

It's worth looking at that and how it's implemented. Any time rankings plummet it's wise to examine any recent and substantial changes.

[edited by: tedster at 4:48 am (utc) on Feb. 15, 2009]

[adamxcl]

Adsense stats are stuck today, Valentines Day. As of early evening, they are still at amounts from early morning. So don't worry about that aspect of this.

You have to check your links somehow, hired help or doing it yourself. I had a similar site a while back that had thousands of links out. Lots of 404s, bad neighborhoods and those grow over time. I cleaned it up and rankings improved once again. It does matter. This could be your problem.

Since then, I've tracked number on a website. Out of 30,000 outbound links, 300 or more of them go bad every single month. It's big.