Questions about two suggested changes for Panda recovery

[Rasputin]

On a thread on the google webmaster blog there were a couple of suggestions about panda recovery that seemed plausible and relevant to my situation, I was hoping for second opinions:

1) Interlinking to a subdomain from the main menu of a site (and also from the main menu of the subdomain back to the parent site) can be seen as an inter-site linking scheme and cause penalties, and perhaps also carry a panda penalty from the subdomain back to the main site

2) Too many links in the text of a page can cause problems e.g. a category page about a type of widget where almost every sentence includes links to detailed information pages about the various aspects of that widget (made up example: main page New York, links to Empire State Building etc - i.e the sub-pages all stand alone as quality pages) up to about 100 links on the category page.

Cheers

[colonelu81]

I moved as a test some pages from pandalized domain to subdomain . Heavy interlinking between domain and subdomain .
Pages moved regained previous positions , but i also rewrote those pages so they are all unique .
Done that 20 days ago and till now have not seen a problem from google point of view .

[Rasputin]

That's interesting, seems to suggest that if both sites are good quality then it's OK to interlink them (which is what I would have expected).

Our case is slightly different in that 90% of the pages on the subdomain are affiliate feed type pages, all with noindex since almost a year ago, and were already on the subdomain. There is no sign of panda recovery for the subdomain or the main domain (which is now good quality IMO) hence I'm wondering if the subdomain is holding it back.

I'm probably going to just remove the affiliate pages completely but had understood that would make no difference because they are already nofollow - opinions seem to differ on whether deletion is necessary for poor quality pages or noindex is enough.

[colonelu81]

Hubpages , Blogger or Wordpress are good examples in which bad subdomains DO NOT affect rankings of good subdomains despite linking between subdomains or between subdomain and main domain .
I would say a bad subdomain should not affect main domain rankings if the main domain has good/relevant content .
Maybe you should remove affiliate pages and see what happens next .
In my case noindex and 404 thin/duplicate content did not helped , many good pages still ranked badly . Only after i moved to subdomain some pages i saw improvements only for those pages . Main domain still pandalized
But only 20 days since the move , bad things can still happen

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

1) no
2) no

There is likely no way you can interlink your content to overcome Panda and I can show you a site with over 2000 links on many of its pages that did well last Panda update. The site is 10 years old and the owner talks about everything. He has two sidebars using a table layout FULL of links on the UGLIEST site you've ever seen(read:no css) but it works.

[Rasputin]

@sgt_kickaxe,

There is likely no way you can interlink your content to overcome Panda

Thanks for your feedback - I wasn't quite clear with your answer but the first question was more whether removing interlinking between subdomains could help.

It seemed believable that either:

(1) the interlinked subdomain is treated as part of the main site, which would therefore perhaps suffer the associated 'sitewide panda penalty', or
(2) it would NOT be treated as part of the main subdomain, which would therefore be seen as 'excessive interlinking between two separately owned sites'.

Quite possible I'm clutching at straws though. As you know the problem is everything is so hard to pin down - we see many other sites behaving in ways that to all appearances should get them penalised and sailing along without a problem, while other clean looking sites seem to get penalised unnecessarily.

Perhaps as much to do with some general assigned trust factor as anything else.