Too many inlinks to the homepage = ban?

[DarrenHaye]

But you don't know what to do you're probably doing it wrong. Digging the hole faster and harder doesn't fill the hole.

.

There are basic things to do such as..

Duplicate content, thin content, go ahead and add some quality original content.

You have poor spammy links, go ahead and try and get them removed and add new quality links while you're at it to replace them.

Doing stuff like that would be terrible why? why would you need to wait to do that.

[KernelPanic]

.

There are basic things to do such as..

Duplicate content, thin content, go ahead and add some quality original content.

You have poor spammy links, go ahead and try and get them removed and add new quality links while you're at it to replace them.

Doing stuff like that would be terrible why? why would you need to wait to do that.

1) Yeah duplicate content remove it, I thought we were talking about Penguin

2) You are telling someone who doesn't know a good link from a hole in the ground to remove links. How do you know they know the difference? I do know, they don't, most people don't, present company included.

3) Then you are telling them to get more links, again if they knew how the hell to get good links they wouldn't be in this mess! lol.

In three months we should have enough data to where we can give precise direction, right now you're just telling people to mine gold in the dark hoping they'll hit a nugget. With your advice to start hacking away at their site the pick they are using will most likely hit their foot.

[DarrenHaye]

1) Yeah duplicate content remove it, I thought we were talking about Penguin

2) You are telling someone who doesn't know a good link from a hole in the ground to remove links. How do you know they know the difference? I do know, they don't, most people don't, present company included.

3) Then you are telling them to get more links, again if they knew how the hell to get good links they wouldn't be in this mess! lol.

In three months we should have enough data to where we can give precise direction, right now you're just telling people to mine gold in the dark hoping they'll hit a nugget. With your advice to start hacking away at their site the pick they are using will most likely hit their foot.

I'm not going to lie, I haven't read this thread in a while and as I remembered he didn't know exactly what was wrong with his site.

But, 3 months is the time for a manual penalty to be lifted right? that is why (I think) Darrin is saying wait it out..

If the problem is panda or penguin and you can correlate dates to match then doing nothing wont help, as I understand it things need to be fixed so that when the next refresh happens you can regain rankings.

But I guess you're right, telling someone to do something they don't know how to do in the first place isn't going to help them; If someone told me how to fix my car and left me to it I think I would end up having to dust off my bike lol.

2) You are telling someone who doesn't know a good link from a hole in the ground to remove links. How do you know they know the difference? I do know, they don't, most people don't, present company included.

I can't spot a bad link?

I think you disagreed with something I said in a thread the other day, but I wasn't sure what you were disagreeing with.

I think fully spammed out anchor text is bad, sitewide links especially with keyword anchor text is bad.

Do you think those assumptions are wrong? and I will admit they're assumptions, but I would say they are a educated guess, from personal experience and looking into others.

[KernelPanic]

SEO_AM agrees: Totally agree. Every once in a while you post something of value.

Sit enough monkeys at enough typewriters....

[ddzc]

I was told by many I wasn't hit by the penguin and was highly suggested to submit the reconsideration request. What's doen is done I suppose...live and learn.

The only thing that I can think of is the fact that 800 out of my 1600 link profile is coming from a sidewide link on a famous site in my niche. This means that 800 links have the same anchor text. The rest of my profile is clean.

I always thought that Google only counts those 800 links as 1 because it's coming from a single domain. Would someone be able to answerand clarify this for me please? Did this one site mess me up?

Dan

[DarrenHaye]

I was told by many I wasn't hit by the penguin and was highly suggested to submit the reconsideration request. What's doen is done I suppose...live and learn.

The only thing that I can think of is the fact that 800 out of my 1600 link profile is coming from a sidewide link on a famous site in my niche. This means that 800 links have the same anchor text. The rest of my profile is clean.

I always thought that Google only counts those 800 links as 1 because it's coming from a single domain. Would someone be able to answerand clarify this for me please? Did this one site mess me up?

Dan

I think the problem with sitewide links for a business site is the only real scenario for having them is they're either going to be an advert or link to your own site.

So if the anchor text is keyworded, you're 100% clear sign trying to manipulate the SERPs.

^ just my own speculation

Have things not improved for you at all yet Dan? have you been any closer to figuring out what you think the actual cause was.

[ddzc]

No improvements one bit. The site is literally banned/punished for any keyword rankings...even my full homepage title does not appear in Google. The homepage doesn't exist in Google for absolutely everything except it's URL, so it's still in the index.

I'm going to eliminate those 800 links from this one domain and see what happens. I just requested the webmaster to take the sidewide link down. We'll see what happens when the indexes and my backlink profile updates. I'll keep you all informed how this goes..

Dan

[DarrenHaye]

No improvements one bit. The site is literally banned/punished for any keyword rankings...even my full homepage title does not appear in Google. The homepage doesn't exist in Google for absolutely everything except it's URL, so it's still in the index.

I'm going to eliminate those 800 links from this one domain and see what happens. I just requested the webmaster to take the sidewide link down. We'll see what happens when the indexes and my backlink profile updates. I'll keep you all informed how this goes..

Dan

Well you need to wait for a penguin refresh to see what happens.. if it is penguin.

I didn't say you should remove the link, nothing is ever black and white, really I would of had to of seen the link to tell you definitely if I would remove it and even then that would only be my opinion..

Have you shared your site?.

[ddzc]

We'll never know without testing and analysis. The sites been banned for over 3 months and I feel that just sitting here and twiddling my thumbs will not help the recovery of my ranks...so we shall see.

It looks like there some light at the end of this dark tunnel..if WPMU.org recovered the penguin by cleaning up their link profile. Thanks for the link Dr.

[SEO_AM]

I think there are a few approaches to resolving a penguin attack:

1. If you have built a site that is a beauty to behold as far as content and have never (?) done any dodgy link building... Don't touch anything until you can identify if there really is a problem.

2. If you have a site that is above average and you have mostly (?) gone the white hat route with some dumb link building thrown in... Look for the dumb and neutralize the problems, then wait. Don't panic... Stop digging and wait.

3. If you have a site with mostly unearned or garbage links... Decide if you want to try to fix it or start over. I would think in most cases that starting over would be the fastest route.

[Dr.Marie]

Something is not adding up for me here. I don't have a solution but wanted to add my thoughts.

You mentioned the following:

It looks like I got caught up in the middle of all those updates.

As per my reports...I was completely gone on May 16. Between Mid April to May 16, it shuffles around, got removed a couple of times and put back up and on May 16 it was officially taken down for good.

From what I've seen, the sites that got hit with an algo change (Penguin or Panda) had a sudden, dramatic decrease in traffic that was really obviously started on the date of either Penguin or Panda starting or refreshing.

There was a Panda refresh May 9, but nothing on May 16. If you can't correlate a traffic drop with the date of one of the algo changes then I wouldn't be so quick to think that this is a Penguin or Panda problem.

ALSO, I see your site ranking nicely. You rank for several long term searches that I tried. Here's a thought - you mentioned someone had copied your stuff and there was duplicate content out there. It's possible that this was somehow Panda related (and you got caught up unfairly). Last night there was a Panda refresh and Google may have figured out that your site was the original and now the duplicates are penalized. Not saying that's what happened, but it's possible.

It's possible that there was something totally unrelated to Panda or Penguin going on and now you're back.

Check out your backlink profile on OSE when ranked by anchor text: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/anch...=trulyhuge.com

You've got the majority of links using your url as anchor text and that is what it is supposed to be.

I wouldn't be so quick to remove the site-wide link...but that's just my opinion.

This is the problem with forums. Everybody's got an opinion, but no one knows for sure. We get sooooo many people who come in here and say, "Why is my site tanking? I have built up a bunch of links from articles, blog comments and forums. Why don't I rank?" And then we tell them that this is not good and could get them penguinized. (Is that a word? If not, it should be.) In general, those linking tactics are not good...but it doesn't mean that every site that has a few blog comments, or a couple of site wides is going to get penalized!

[Test-ok]

I wouldn't have deleted that site wide links that quick...I would have checked the site where the sitewide link was and see if that site still ranked for it's top keywords. That should tell you if that link is good or classified as unnatural.
But thats pure speculation on my part.

I see where you say this site can't be found under anything other than the url, and the Dr. say's it's found nicely...which is it?
unless I read something wrong.

[ddzc]

SEO,
I would probably be classified under #2.

Dr,
The site was gone mid May. Maybe the penguin attack took 3 weeks to completely take me out, b/c like I mentioned, in April-May, I was bouncing on and off the results of Google. I know this is not related to Panda b/c everything on my site is original content.

I think you got confused when I mentioned that site trulyhuge. I mentioned that I did a link exchange with them in April...I don't own that site. I never mentioned my URL in this thread.

Test,
I really have no other choice. I've done a lot of changes since April to get this back and none have worked. I've varied many of my backlinks so it's leveled out evenly, and the only thing sticking out like a sore thumb are those 800 links from that one site. Once those are removed, the profile will be well balanced. I also inspected other sidewides on that site and none of them are really ranking, so maybe that's it.

The site providing the sitewide is highly authoritative and ranking for good keywords. I talked to the owner whom I know and he took my link off the homepage sitewide and put it on a static subpage.

I've run out of ideas. If this doesn't work, the site is scraped unfortunately...I've tried everything.