Can 950 penalty be caused by PageRank Sculpting

[speedshopping]

We have 50,000 pages in directory /s/ that were hit with a 950 penalty across several subdomains - they all have in common on average 35 nofollow links to internal pages that pretty much show affiliated product description pages /t/ (these are noindexed) - could Google potentially 950 the /s/ pages for nofollowing too much in the links on the page?

Since the /t/ pages are noindexed via robots, do we have to use nofollow on /s/ or should we just remove them to avoid looking like we are sculpting?

Regards,
Wesiwyg

[tedster]

I've been thinking about your question for a while. My first impression is that your -950 situation is not caused by a noindex situation alone - especially one designed to keep affiliate boilerplate out of the index. Something else must be contributing to your problem- usually something related to an attempt at keyword boosting.

That said, there is a difference between using robots.txt (the page doesn't even get crawled) and using a noindex meta tag (the page must be crawled for the noindex request to be seen.) I'm not sure if that clarifies the situation or not, but it seems to me it may be relevant for your analysis.

[Dave_Hybrid]

I read "50,000 pages" and "internal pages that pretty much show affiliated product description pages" ... all great content ?

[speedshopping]

thanks for replying guys - the 50,000 pages they link to are affiliate descriptions...we admit we do use 3rd party feeds on our recently 950'd pages, but we have been relatively successful doing so for the last 4 years - if someone could actually tell us this is the reason for our 950 plight, we would accept and move on...

[Dave_Hybrid]

50,000 pages, what are on them?

[speedshopping]

We do have product feeds on the 50k as well as our own content, we have researched and tried so many theories to this 950 that we are on last chance saloon, we havent actually been hit significantly by panda like other price comparison losers in the past, which makes us believe its something we have caused...