Article Directory Link Problems

Can too many article links hurt you?

[Kelowna]

Has anyone had a site that they were submitting articles for backlinks at places like ezine seen their rankings tank in the last few month's?

I have a site that was doing this and was moving up in the listings for some very hard keywords for about 6 months. I would guess that there would have been about 300 articles with links back to the site added in this time. Then in November the site took a dive, but only for the keywords I was using in the ezines. Still on page one for even tougher keywords but just the ezine stuff tanked.

What I am trying to figure out is has the site been penalized somehow for just those keywords, or did Google change something in November to devalue ezine type links. Has anyone else had anything similar happen to them?

Could it be links from ezine type sites are the problem?

Or could it be too many links from the same sort site like too many blog links, too many ezine, too many low quality links pages that can trigger this sort of thing?

[Kelowna]

well, judging by the lack of replies that I must be barking up the wrong tree. Back to the drawing board to see what got devalued or changed back in November

[linkbuildr]

did you target all the same anchor text?

[Kelowna]

no I always keep it varied. Just seems odd that the keywords I was after using articles from ezine are the only ones I dropped very harshly for.

[jimbeetle]

There was what appeared to be an across the board devaluing of links in the article marketing arena back around Oct 21st. It isn't that these links will now hurt a site or result in a penalty, it's just that they aren't worth as much as they were resulting in lowered positions.

[Kelowna]

Thanks Jim, I did some searching and only found one comment from Brinked back on Nov 17th...

3. I also believe google is starting to devalue sitewide links a bit, especially if all your backlinks are sitewides, you may be in trouble. Also, if you depend on 1 type of link (such as all article links, all directory links etc) you may have gotten hit as well.

Was there any other discussion on this that I may have missed?

[Planet13]

There was what appeared to be an across the board devaluing of links in the article marketing arena back around Oct 21st.

I, too, would love to hear of any discussion about this on any forums. thanks in advance if you have a link.

[CainIV]

I can't see how getting a large number of links from these types of directories would be helpful. A friend of mine on this board stated it best:

At worst they could not affect you at all.
At best, they could cause rankings to drop.

Try and stick to truly niche and unique places that don't actively hand out thousands upon thousands of links every day for free if you are looking for a vote high in 'editorial value' from the search engines.