Just got penalized BADLY for a stupid mistake I should have noticed. *Ouch*

Welp, I didn't realize this until Google penalized ALL of my keyphrases. Google gave my site about -400 on every search phrase for my site. Basically my copyright at the bottom of my page, which is on my home page, links to my home page... I removed it so hopefully I'll go back to where I was when I get my site checked out by googlebot again...

I guess googlebot must have gotten stuck on my site when it followed the link on my homepage to my homepage, and was forced to keep repeating this, so It timed out or met a set condition, penalized me and left...

So for everyone out there, Don't have a link on your homepage, to your homepage.

 

Are you sure that's it? The crawler should be smarter than that, imo.

 

You might get it all back, just give it some time if thats the reason, but I know a few sites that have a link back home on the homepage.

 

That is strange, millions of sites have a home button on their page or their header image linked to their HP.
Even Amazon.com is guilty of this.

 

I'm pretty sure that's not the problem. Google is much smarter than that. Just about every site has a homepage button on their homepage. Including all of my sites, which don't have any problems in search engine rankings.

 

I believe it was the link, It WAS NOT a homepage link, It was a link in the bottom of my page, that infact I believe spanned ALL of my posts (like 50+ pages) I had the link to the homepage of my blog in the copyright at the bottom so that I could get extra internal link votes, Maybe google saw that as cheating. Well if you could, could you check out my blog and see if there are any flaws in it? I know i'm not linking to any bad neighbors, my keyword density for targeted keywords is within the 2-4%..

anyways, maybe you can find something I didn't see.

http://bad-drivers-today.blogspot.com/

 

Linking to your home page from your home page will not trap bots...even if there is no other link. There is another reason why your SERP's stink. What you don't mention is your site's placement before this. I have a feeling they were about the same...correct?

 

Are you saying the site that got the penalty is that blogspot blog?

And how did you determine that your penalty is -400 ?

were you at X and now find your site at X - 400 listings in the serps?

 

Footer of my website has all links. So every page has link to it self an i have no problems....Maybe you have a backlink in a bad "neighborhood", "linkfarm" or similar.
Good luck

 

Check this post, you are not alone:
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1365228

 

Nope. Amazing that this disinformation still gets spread around like this.

A parser has nothing to do with your score dropping.

 

My serps dropped significantly.

My blog was rated 1 for "Bad Driving Today"

1 for "Bad Drivers Today"
3 for "Bad Driving Blog"
5 for "Bad Drivers"
2 for "Bad Driving"
6 for "Idiot Drivers"

I check my ranking frequently with SEO Elite, I noticed yesterday that my rankings dropped for each of these phrases by at least 400. And I just checked my rankings today, and now I don't even rank in the top 1,000 for each of these phrases. I have no idea what is going on.

MY SITE IS STILL INDEXED BY GOOGLE, IT HAS NOT BEEN BANNED.

 

this happens your website is barely 2 weeks old (looking at the posts) be patient it'll go back up

 

You can find thousands of websites having homepage links at their footers and sidebars navigation links but nothing happens to them. The problem with your site is about something else.

 

This has to be the funniest thread ever. Getting penalized for that....? Is this for real or you are making fun of everyone here Braydo25 ?

 

For real. I couldn't figure out why I suddenly dropped so badly in the rankings. and the only thing I could figure was the homepage thing since I recently added it. I checked everything else as well; backlinks, who I link out to (no bad neighborhoods etc), keywords density, headers, alts, title, meta, backlink relevancy, everything.

 

I forgot to ask you how new the site was, runcheck is right on the money.
On the Warriors forum I learned a term: QDF
it means that there is no sandbox, what there IS is that all brand new sites "temporarily" rank well, then they settle down to where they "really" rank.
Quality Deserves Freshness.. which I guess should read Freshness Deserves Qualtity

think about it this way:

Last year was an election year
if one candidate made some sort of gaff... and Google didn't IMMEDIATELY reflect that... what good would Google seem like to average users?

If it took Gbot 6 weeks to reflect a candidate's misstep, the election would be over!!

 

Your blog is two weeks old so expect serp fluctuations. What is happening to you is nothing unusual.

 

ahh.. alright, Is it always that drastic of a change though for new sites/blogs? I mean, going from 1 to not even ranking in the top 1,000 is a big drop...

 

Site's don't really establish a solid foundation until around 3-12 months, especially in a popular niche. (Granted, your site is on blogspot, so it will probably take less time to become stable.)

Also, from what I can tell, approximately 3-4 sites link to you, totaling ~50 links. Just do the basics and you'll be back in soon: Add Content, Add Links, Repeat