Bad backlinks penalty - what types of links cause it?

[proboscis]

What kind of backlinks can cause a penalty?

For example I have a site that was added to a list of "free directories to boost pr and ranking" and variations of this list have been passed around and posted on a good number of seo blogs, seo forums, make money online blogs, and so on.

They use phrases like "free inbound link creation" and "free high pr links" and some are offering to submit to the whole list for a fee.

Could having my link on this list affect my rankings?

(My site is Not a free backlink directory and people can not get a link on my site by paying an seo)

[tedster]

It's extremely rare that backlinks cause a penalty - and when it does happen, in most cases, it takes thousands of them. The kind of backlinks that might trip a penalty are those that appear to be paid but still pass PageRank. But even thousands of those would not necessarily cause a penalty. There are safeguards in place to keep competitors from easily giving their competitiona a penalty.

Your situation sounds like you should have no worry from that one link. Are you currently struggling with a penalty and looking for an explanation?

[proboscis]

Hi tedster,

Thanks for your answer you are always so helpful. Yes, this site suffered a loss of ranking in June of 2008 and never recovered, now another further loss around May 19th.

In May several of my best terms were pushed back to page 5, 6 or worse - but the same pages still rank for other terms, and I have other pages that remain unaffected.

The bad backlinks that I found were more than just one link, it looks like my site is on a list that lots of sites have published, if I search for a snippet from the list google shows 208 results and I think people copy the list and make their own variations of it so there could be more, but I don't even know if they really are bad backlinks they do look spammy though, so I didn't know if I should keep looking at that or if it was a waste of time...

This is an 11 year old site that always did well up until June 2008.

[tedster]

Check out the discussions in the August Updates thread [webmasterworld.com]. There are several similar report and some successful approaches to getting the situation handled and the penalty lifted.

[Marcia]

I've seen *way* overly repetitive internal anchor text links drop a site down from top 10 to 540 for the main keyword phrase in question - and it's staying down there.

It's in the alt= attribute of the top logo graphic, an the long phrase it's in is being treated as boilerplate text.

[tedster]

I've seen data that suggests a high correlation these days between high ranking and "healthy" alt attribute text. If Google has cranked up the relevance on keyword-in-alt-attribute, it would make sense that unnatural alt text can get you dinged - especially on internal links from images.

[proboscis]

hmmm I don't have a lot of internal links to the affected pages, there are a few internal links to each page maybe 5 - 25 each and the whole site is around 1300 pages.

But I do have five words in the alt tag of the logo, should I change it to just the word "home"?

Also there is a 79 word copyright statement in a comment tag on every page, is that boilerplate text even though it's not actually on the page just in the comments?

The affected words are not in the logo's alt text or comment tag.

[Marcia]

proboscis, do you have any other indications of the site being filtered for other instances of boilerplate text?

[proboscis]

I don't think so, if I search for the alt text in the logo my site comes up number one, then I just tried searching for all the words in my navigation and that is not filtered.

I'm not sure what to look at, I have titles, descriptions, and on page sentences that are similar but nothing is repeated throughout the site.