Penalty?

Spent a load on linking and now peanlised

[Crush]

Latest PR update has been a disaster. We had 4 sites linking to each other only from the index pages. All the sites had a few hundred independent links. It cost me about a grand a month in staff to get all these links and now we have gone from 400 backlinks to 14 on one and 200 to 10 on another.

Not sure if it a manual penalty applied or what cause we are the only ones who have seemed to suffer. What would you do? Get new domains?

[robotsdobetter]

I suggest to wait for a while (Next PR update) to see what happens. You may what to contact Google and ask if you have any penalty(s) against you. You should look at every site you are linking to and make sure they are not braking any rules of Google and go to other search engines and see if looks like they have a penalty against you.

Also if you have a links page make sure their is no more then 100 links on it, but best to keep at 10 to 20 links per page.

[Receptional]

If those 400 backlinks send 1 real visitor a week each, then even without Google you should generate 1,600 visitors per month, or about 20,000 visitors a year which makes it possibly a better investment than PPC.

If they don't, then you can probably guess why Google doesn't rate the pages with the links on them.

Just my two pence worth.

[Crush]

We are in travel so we get every link we can from every site as we know it works. It is the only way and all the other sites that are there are the same. All the links we got are garbarge from other travel sites but with reasonable pr. We will never get customers from links pages.

[glengara]

So what happened?

Were the links being previously shown by G, or were they new?
Was there actual loss of PR or just the expected increase didn't materialise?
Have the pages sunk in the rankings, or remained much the same?

[walkman]

"All the sites had a few hundred independent links"
reciprocal links or one way?

[Crush]

Were the links being previously shown by G, or were they new?
Was there actual loss of PR or just the expected increase didn't materialise?
Have the pages sunk in the rankings, or remained much the same?

To answer these:

All the links were showing prior to the update. Weird one on the pr. One site is showing a PR6 and then all the other pages are 0 or 2 or something like that.

The site have gone from being #1 to outerspace.

[Crush]

Also the links were half reciprocal and the other half not. Though I had a nice mix there but G has given us the shaft.

[glengara]

Could just be a glitch.

If it doesn't sort itself out quickly, you might try "de-coupling" the four sites, your linkage may have been pinged as a "link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank".

[johnser]

Same problem here Crush. Outerspace on serps.

As Glengara said (Hi Gg!) "link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank" could well be the problem.

I posted elsewhere about sites 'apparently' showing a "cluster effect" tripping a new filter. Think thats what happened on the 12th. We didn't even have your hundreds of independent links.

We're now seriously building lots of independent links & decoupling from our PR8 link network. Hope that should do the trick

J

[Net_Wizard]

I don't think it has something to do with over 'cross' linking. One of my site have thousands of backlinks, lost most of it and only a handful are left, from PR6 to PR4.

Weird thing do, one site that have multiple links to my site and vice versa have retained its PR and backlinks, haven't got effected at all.

We have multiple links to each other not to boost PR but as a service to our visitors, we're theme related but offer different services. It's just logical that we end up having a partnership of some sort, one needs the other to provide a more complete service to users.

But my site got hit by this problem and their site was not.

Other than this cross linking, most of my backlinks are unsolicited or unreciprocated.

Go figure.

[Net_Wizard]

I've just checked a PR6 site for backlinks and guess what...

PR1 and above are showing as backlinks :(

I double checked in case just this page for whatever reason.....multiple pages of PR1s & PR2s are showing as backlinks...that's why this PR6 site have hundreds of them as backlinks.

I checked my PR4 site for backlinks lower than PR4...none of them showed and I'm 100% sure that I have hundreds too of low PR backlinks.

Is this some kind of selective PR calculation? Now, I'm beginning to feel like some sort of penalty.

[Net_Wizard]

More mystery...

How on earth a page with a single backlink of PR3 can have a PR of 4?

Crazy or what? lol