Report: Time it Took for Filter to be Removed

[Decius]

My domain was on the first page of google for a certain keyword.

I added a sitemap to my site, on the site (a number of links to internal links).

Main page was removed from all searches for that keyword. Other internal sites still ranked, main page still showed up when doing the site:www.domain.com search.

Concluded it was because keyword saturation became too great because of the sitemap (links are text too) so I removed the sitemap.

Dates:
Site was off front page for about 2 months.

On October 20th, removed sitemap.
On October 25th, site is on first page, similar rank.

So it took approximately 5 days for the filter to be removed once it was fixed.

Thought this would be helpful since I couldnt find such data elsewhere.

[tedster]

Thanks, much. I've seen a similar time scale (7 days). But that was in 2009, and not since Caffeine went live.

I'd guess the time is going to vary from site to site, especially depending on the normal crawling rate. Do you have any idea of the time between crawling and restored rankings?

[epmaniac]

hi decius

did u add html site map to the site or xml site map?

tedster
does this apply to xml site map also?

[Decius]

Webmaster tools says it crawls about 64 pages a day, so I'm guessing it saw the change on the 21st.

[Decius]

I added links into the main page. So on the bottom I added links to internal sites. I did not create a separate html page or xml page.

[tedster]

does this apply to xml site map also?

Definitely not. A filter like this would be only for your html anchor text.

[epmaniac]

@decius

u mean u added few links on your homepage? or u added links side wide

just curious, as i remember i added 4 internal links on my homepage on thursday before my main domain vanished

@tedster

meaning, we have to maintain some density percentage or number of link count on each page of site map?
if yes then how many links and what density percentage ? thanks in advance tedster, wonder where would i land up if it weren't for you :)

[tedster]

Meaning you cannot repeat the same keyword in anchor text over and over and over. There's no exact percentage to share - whatever it might be at any given time is variable and seems to depend on the average practice in your niche.

But you have to be way over the top to run into this problem. If you can look at your page like a normal visitor it just jumps out at you. Natural link text would not look like this.

[Decius]

epmaniac:

Say I have a store on widgets and in that store I have blue widgets, green widgets, small widgets, big widgets.

So on my main page (not sitewide) I added links to all of the different kinds of widgets using their titles as the link text.

In doing so, my main page got filtered (not penalized).

Hope that clears it up. This is not about links to the homepage having the same anchor text or anything like that. It's simply about the actual text content on that page having too high a saturation of the widget keyword.

[tedster]

Especially because the text was ANCHOR text. That is Google's ticklish underbelly.

[corepartner]

I also feel that these days ranking a new content is very difficult and I am suffering with this problem too :(