Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The directory DOES NOT provide reciprocal links. We link to sites regardless of whether they backlink to us or not. Outbound links are based on strict editorial guidelines that ensure the linkee is not spam and is appropriate for our niche, categories and users. We reject/ignore 99% of thousands of monthly requests for reciprocal links (which we get because of our high ranking). We DO NOT sell links. All listings are free. We DO NOT buy links to our site.
We spend many hours researching and maintaining our links to make sure they are up to date and relevant. The information is 100% human edited ... no scraping. There is a 30%-40% annual churn in our listings (total adds, deletes and modifications). The amount of work we put into our site has discouraged competitors from trying to copy us.
Recently we have been more aggresive in asking for links to our site by contacting owners of sites we link to as part of an informational e-mail about their link. In addition to providing details about their link, instructions about how to make changes and corrections and a brief information about our site, we make it clear that a backlink to our site is not required, but is requested as a favor. We do offer enhanced listings as an incentive for providing a link (a customized description), but only a fraction of those linking to us take us up on the offer.
The ratio of reciprocal links to outbound links (not counting dups from different pages on the same domain) is estimated to be currently less than 5% ... i.e. <5% of the links in our directory have a corresponding "reciprocal link".
My question is this: Do you think Google is penalizing us for a substantial increase in the number of inbound links in too short a period, even though our outbound links are highly relevant and the inbound links we get are from highly relevant/trusted sources?
Second question: If this is the case, do you think that by stopping the practice of requesting backlinks, would that be sufficient for the penalty to be removed in the future?
Signed,
Sad, Discouraged and Frustrated
I'd suggest you really dig into your backlink profile to see if there are some funny things going on. Don't just depend on Google's Tools, use Yahoo's Site Explorer, Bing, whatever you can get your hands on.
I'd also suggest browsing your site - and especially browsing it with your user agent set to googlebot. There may have been a hack you aren't noticing, and sometimes parasite content gets inserted in a cloaked fashion.
We've already carefully browsed and analyzed the returned source of our pages and haven't found any hacks or injections.
The backlink profile does has some spammy sites linking to us without our permission, but we don't link to them. They are not under our control, so I don't know how we get removed from them, since they ignore our request for removal. Since they are not reciprocal, I don't believe that Google will penalize us for them.
We are concerned with Google's description of a possible "link scheme" as Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you"). I have been researching a lot about this lately, especially what Matt Cutts has had to say on the subject. Although it appears that he has said that getting relevant backlinks is OK, he has made vague negative references about sites with too many links that don't even help the site get traffic. He seems to have an attitude that somehow "if you build it then they will come".
Also, I wonder how Google can determine relevancy. For example, if an auto race speedway provided links to all the companies that sponsored any of the drivers, a robot might not see any relevancy. Or how about if they linked to businesses in a 5 mile radius, even though the businesses had nothing to do with auto racing.
Recently, we are experiencing a -50 Google penalty
How do you specifically know this? Are you referring to rankings for a specific keyword or all keywords? Did you get a warning or correspondence from G?
The directory DOES NOT provide reciprocal links. We link to sites regardless of whether they backlink to us or not
If you are linking back to a site that just so happens to be linking back to yours, that is a reciprocal link. Just because you do not require reciprocation doesn't mean you do not reciprocal link. Maybe you meant to say you do not require reciprocation?
My question is this: Do you think Google is penalizing us for a substantial increase in the number of inbound links in too short a period, even though our outbound links are highly relevant and the inbound links we get are from highly relevant/trusted sources?
As long as your "substantial increase in the number of inbounds" is not ridiculous such as 100 a day every night, you have nothing to worry about.
If you are doing what you say by being very picky about who you link to, your increase in inbound links isnt going to be high enough to break any speed limits. Some will argue your RLR (reciprocal link ratio) is too low at 5%. In my experience, I can get a brand new site to rank on the first page within 6 months with a RLR between 40-60% with a moderate volume of reciprocals.
..do you think that by stopping the practice of requesting backlinks, would that be sufficient for the penalty to be removed in the future?
First of all I dont see any proof that you have been penalized. How do you know that this is a simply a case of your competition improving their rankings versus your site being penalized?
Rankings go up and down. That is a normal part of the web which is why you do not want to be solely dependent on traffic from search engines. It's well known that the search engines toss fresh data into results to see if they get a click (everytime you click on a result in a search engine, the engine knows you clicked). They test the waters with new results all the time.
You need to take a big deep breath and not over analyze this too much. GET RELEVANT LINKS anytime you can get them. If the other site wants a linkback (yes a reciprocal), link back and GET THE LINK. Of course continue to maintain editorial discretion and dont link to sites that you deem junky or in poor taste for your end users.
If you are obtaining links (through reciprocation if needed) and if you are maintaining editorial discretion, its almost impossible to bust a speed limit. If you are using a full duplex product that is forcing you to link in a high volume every night, then sure thats much easier to bust. That's not your case.
Also do not forget that although yes you need quality links to maintain rankings, you also have to update content on a regular basis. It's well known that rankings are not determined solely based on links. The engines have stated publically that hundreds of factors go into determining rankings.
I have seen sites that focus so much on linking but forgo updating their content lose rankings. You do not want your website to appear "cob-webbed" to the engines. And I am not talking about turnkey content you can copy and paste or buy from an article submission directory. Update your content with ORIGINAL useful and RELEVANT content that benefits your end user's experience on a regular basic. When the engines see new and original content on your site, its a positive point towards your overall rankings.
I've always said here "links and content" .. if you keep both fresh and evolving, the engines will see your site as a thriving place on the web versus a cob-webbed relic.
How do you specifically know this? Are you referring to rankings for a specific keyword or all keywords? Did you get a warning or correspondence from G?
I left this information out. Search on "domain" for site domain.com used to be #1 ... now is on 5th page. On WMT, I have high link position for many keywords in June. All have dropped 40 to 50 positions. So yes ... all keywords, of which we were highly ranked for many thousands. No warning or correspondence from Google (I wouldn't expect any).
Maybe you meant to say you do not require reciprocation?
This is what I meant.
As long as your "substantial increase in the number of inbounds" is not ridiculous such as 100 a day every night, you have nothing to worry about.
It may have been "ridiculous". Over two months, we attempted to contact 50,000 sites. Of course, I was not aware of Google's excessive linking edict. Remember, that I never thought I was doing anything wrong, because the sites we contacted were all related to our site's content and any backlinks generated from this effort should have been highly relevant and non-spammy (in our mind). In the same period, the number of outbound links added to our site was negligable.
Since we contacted sites that were already in our directory, all new backlinks would be considered reciprocal by Google, but because of the timing of the outbound/inbound links, Google should not consider them as "you link to me, I link to you" reciprocal links. The average age of the outbound links is 2 years.
Some will argue your RLR (reciprocal link ratio) is too low at 5%.
Remember that no link on our site is for the purpose of reciprocal linking ... it is to provide a very useful collection of links for our users. I'm not sure if you are implying that there maybe something wrong with our site if only 5% want to link to it or instead are you suggesting that we try to get more reciprocal links.
How do you know that this is a simply a case of your competition improving their rankings versus your site being penalized?
Already answered, but it is clear from the SERPs that our site moved down not the 50 others moved up. Many pages now above us appear to be much less relevant than ours.
GET RELEVANT LINKS anytime you can get them. If the other site wants a linkback (yes a reciprocal), link back and GET THE LINK.
Our site pretty much is made up wholely of links, as previously stated, human selected and organized ... think Open Directory, but we're specialized in a particular niche. Consequently we only link when the site fits within our niche and is of high quality.
If you are obtaining links (through reciprocation if needed) and if you are maintaining editorial discretion, its almost impossible to bust a speed limit.
It appears that you have a lot of experience with this. Are you saying that you haven't seen anybody downgraded by following this strategy even in such an aggressive way?
If you are using a full duplex product that is forcing you to link in a high volume every night, then sure thats much easier to bust. That's not your case.
No. We don't.
Also do not forget that although yes you need quality links to maintain rankings, you also have to update content on a regular basis.
Every month we add about 2K-4K new links, delete about 500 bad links and change another 1K-2K links and have done so for several years with consistently very good rankings. This is our site's content.
I have seen sites that focus so much on linking but forgo updating their content lose rankings.
Great advice to everyone. We believe that focusing on our content is exactly why we have gotten great rankings for 10 years. We thought that getting more inbound links would make us LESS dependent on Google and search engines, but I believe that it has backfired on us.
We don't/haven't focused on backlinks in a while. We used to contact 2K-5K sites a month on a regular basis without issues and it used to improve our rankings, but stopped around 2004. Things were very different back then, I guess.
A question for you: have you personally followed sites penalized by Google for "excessive linking" or "too many backlinks in a short period" (e.g. your customers/clients)? If so, were any able to recover by stopping the practice?
I received an e-mail in WMT saying that "We've processed your reconsideration request". The same day, after a week of slow, modest, even encouraging progress in the rankings, my site suddenly dropped back to -50 or even -100 penalty status for most keywords.
Since the initial request, I have improved my understanding of the makeup of my site's backlinks. According to WMT, we have about 10,000 backlinks from 3,500 distinct domains. 35% of the inbound domains are reciprocal. We have 150K outbound links from 120K distinct domains. Therefore 3% of the outbound links are reciprocal. Both inbound and outbound links are highly relevant (assuming Google's algo is good enough to determine this). I don't see how Google can have a problem with this.
The 10,000 backlinks didn't just appear overnight. These have been added over a 10+ year period. We have had many thousands of good backlinks for a while. I have never tracked the number in the past, so I don't know how many were added in the two month period before we were penalized. I would guess somewhere between 1K and 2K.
About 30% of the backlinks are from headers/footers of relevant sites, both reciprocal and not. However these come from just 1% of the domains linking to us. Wouldn't Google discount the effect of the multiple linking from from a given site?
At least 15% of the backlinks are from easily identifiable spam sites (from 7% of the domains). Another 10% of the links from 10% of the domains are from two different companies that own thousands of domains. They scraped Google and put the results on many of their domains. We didn't ask for (or pay for) any of these links and never contacted them in any way. We do not link to any of these on our site.
About 20% of the links come from about 1,600 domains that are not easily identified by the domain or link name as spam. They look like they might be relevant, however it will take many hours to visit each domain to determine its true nature. I hope I don't have to do this.
I have no reason to believe the mix of spam in my badlinks has changed substanially in the last couple of months. The spam links appear without my knowledge or any activity on my part.
Even though, based on different measures, between 25% (15% pure spam + 10% two domain farm owners) and 75% (add 30% from header/footers and a maximum of 20% for unidentified domains) of the backlinks are spam. I prefer to believe the lower number for the reasons given above, but am I wrong?
If I am being penalized for the backlinks, what action can I take to solve this and show Google that I'm not doing anything wrong?
