Problem with Too Many Links from Portal Site?

Should we remove the links?

[NazaretH]

Only one of our sites can't get rid of Florida/Austin filter penalty. IT is #1 for allin--anything---:... , and has always been #1 for its terms, but it is at pos. 100+ after Florida/Austin. We rewritten content (100 clean, almost all text, nice content now) but it doesn't help. Site has PR6.

The only thing that "might" be a problem is a link from our another BIG portal site on every page of it (like Created by OUR COMPANY KEY PHRASE). Should we remove than link or not? Any ideas?

[AthlonInside]

Since you have lost everything, you have nothing more to lose and you should try everything at any means to get back what you have lost!

TRY ANYTHING THAT YOU THINK MIGHT BE THE REASON!

instead of sitting there doing nothing ...

[djgreg]

NazaretH:
same thing with some of my sites. I have set up links from every page of some big portal sites of mine to with keyword-anchortext. Now these sites have gone from the SERPS. I have removed the links and now I'm waiting if anything changes.
I wonder if that would have happened if my big portal sites would be hosted on a different IP-Range.
I think rather not, because then a competitor could hurt you by setting up trash sites and linking from every trash page to you.

Or maybe there are other factors despite IP-Range from which Google determines if a website has the same owner or not?

[steveb]

"TRY ANYTHING THAT YOU THINK MIGHT BE THE REASON!"

Standing on your head and praying to goat entrails is not a good seo tactic.

[ciml]

AthlonInside, if you try everything at once then you won't be able to see the effects in isolation.

NazaretH, you're on the right track but don't expect your listings to spring back very quickly.

[AthlonInside]

No one is correct or wrong. Just different mind sets. :)

By the way, doing nothing is not a SEO tactic at all.

[Tom_Dalton]

No one is correct or wrong?

I think we just have no way of knowing who is correct or wrong -- but many people are probably wrong, and everyone might be wrong. Somebody might even be right.

We are a bunch of blind people describing an elephant, and as long as we define a limited enough frame of reference, we can be right within that. Until I start seeing someone bust out some real science in here, though, I'm going to vote for most everyone being pretty wrong, in general.

Now, wrong can still work -- like water dowsers.

So, the question becomes, does it matter whether we're right or wrong, as long as we get results that are not provably wrong enough to lose our clients? :o)

(Wow, this whole post is cynical and confusing. It must be early on a Monday morning, or something.)

[BigDave]

By the way, doing nothing is not a SEO tactic at all.

Sometimes it is a very good tactic. Once a site reaches the point of being optimal, it is a bad idea to do anthing until for some reason it becomes sub-optimal again.

[Herath]

NazaretH,

Does your site link back to your Portals site(s)?

If so, remove that link. We have several affiliated portal sites that has links to us from all their pages. But we make sure we never link back to them.

[NazaretH]

By the way, doing nothing is not a SEO tactic at all.

I thought that it is the main SEO tactic - be patient and wait.

Does your site link back to your Portals site(s)?

Yes, it does - link in portfolio page along with about 20 other links.

From a user's point of view both links from the portal and to the portal are quite reasonable. In first case we show a link to the company that created it (and it's a good advert. for us) and in the second case we show what we created. I can't see no reason for why it should be penalized, although I am aware of possible misuse of such linking.

I think about giving our new text content a chance to fix the problem, so maybe a 2-3 week wait and then if nothing happens, we'll remove the link.

If anyone has experience of similar link removal and
positive results, please share.

p.s. Thanks mods for editing the thread title.

[djgreg]

NazaretH:
I have never linked back to the portal site but my rankings dropped. Maybe it is just Google ignoring multiple links from big sites , because despite these portal links there very few other backlinks to my site. So it is quite reasonable that if links from 500 pages of 1 domain are ignored my site drops in the Serps. I think I should start looking for other link partners.