How Bad Could Sitewide Affiliate Links Be?

[zehrila]

I am going to file a site reconsideration request at Google and considering a massive change in my site, which is removal of all sitewide links. My site was penalized last year, i did almost every thing to fix it and could not find the solution, until recently, when an experiment lead me to believe that the penalty is due to sitewide affiliate links and on page optimization (my best guess). Now i am wondering if i should remove all of them or leave at least 2-3 intact and whether i should put a nofollow to those which i decide to keep intact?

Also, back in 2006 and early 2007 when google policy against buying/selling links was not very strict, i had purchased some links from webdirectories and few blog posts from some blogs and may be some other cheap link building service (i was totally unaware of google's link buying/selling policies). My question is, should i try to get all those links removed as well? those links are pretty old by now and probably add no value to my site but it might be hard to first approach the owners of sites and then get them to remove my links and blog posts. I would like to see what the experts have to suggest on this. I can share my case study as well.

[tedster]

Sitewide outbound links for one particular affiliate product/service might cause a problem if the content of the site was relatively thin. But if those outbound links are passing PR, a nofollow might be all you need - certainly worth a try.

[Prudence]

I'm in a very similar position. My site was penalised in March and I spent the next three months refining existing content and adding more.(Still no recovery as yet!). Do you reckon you have enough content?

I think if you can justify those affiliate links as being relevant to the on-page content and useful to your users, as per the Google guidelines, then maybe it's time to look at other possible reasons for your penalty. Agree with Tedster though, try the nofollow.

[zehrila]

Ted: Sitewide links are for multiple resources which are of same genre as mine. However, i think they are in excess, even tho all of them are highly relevant and very big sites but may be google bot thinks i am buying or selling links through these affiliate links or may be trying to manipulate serps. There is one catch, once if i remove the links, the affiliates would remove mine as well, so may be instead of removing them, i should better option to them?

[zehrila]

Tedster: Sorry i forgot to ask, how should one deal with those blog posts purchased prior google actually started getting strict on such links?

Prudence: I have injected thousands of words worth of articles ever since i got penalty and none of that unique content helped.

Those links are relevant, however, one year of testing has lead me to believe that they are the ones which are causing me harm. Also try to reduce on page optimization and see if that helps e.g reduce excessive usage of keywords?

[tigger]

I would contact the owners of the blogs asking to remove all the links to your site and when you complete the reconsideration request tell them what you've done and that you were given poor advice and have removed the purchased links - bottom line G will know what you've done so you mite as well fess up and hope