I second that. Google loves internal linking,,it's what the internet is all about. Just don't add them to your footer, it looks tacky and spammy.
My first thought is that you tripped some sort of automated malware detection by adding so many links to the footer across so many pages at one time. That would only make sense if the detection doesn't consider whether the links are external or not though. My second thought is that perhaps all of these new links have scattered your pages weight all around and Google just hasn't reevaluated where you stand yet. If I were you, I would stick with this new change for awhile and see if it leads to steady growth. You had to have a reason for doing it in the first place, right? Things always get worse, before they get better. That's just life.
Do the request for reconsideration, and do yourself a favour, and ADMIT what you did was wrong, and that you won't do it again. I had a site penalize a year ago after outsourcing some seo work. We told them what we did, that we were wrong, and would not do it again. We came back stronger than ever. It was resolved within a couple weeks. No sense waiting, put in the request as you have nothing else to lose.
Thanks again for all of your comments! Stuffs like "I've heard from an SEO Guru(?)" and "Google works with patterns" does not really apply here I think and they are useless, however I got some very good hints from the other comments... I think it's too risky to do not do a thing right now, so I'm gonna remove those footer links today or tomorrow, and I will do the reinclusion request this week.. By the way the site is www.travelgrove.com. Expert comments are still very welcome!
Your website is not banned at all and I have looked at your footer links this is completely allowed by Google Webmaster guidelines. Some of my sites have even more links on them and doing fine. Not need to remove them it's fine and looks good also users can easy access sections via your bottom links. We just past a Google update and this could be the cause your site has disappeared from Google search results, so don't panic ! When your website has dropped and you cannot find it anymore for some keywords you have work harder and spend more on link building now. You will see your site come back after some hard work
You're right, they're pretty useless comments if I do say so myself...I realized that only after posting. Good luck
Hi there, Yes our website got banned, but as I wrote before only one section of it and not the all. We have lost the 95% of the Google traffic on the travel guides section. I also thought this sort of linking should be fine with Google, but there is no other change we did lately. Also our pages shows up around ~250th position for keywords for what we had a spot on the first page. It is the same for exact searches as well (if I search for the exact title of our pages). Also the drop happened from one day to the other, and, again, we did not do any other changes lately so I have no other idea what could happen but a ban due the internal linking. Also we already gained some SEO-experience so would not try something what is well known to be a back-hat technique.. but apparently this itself was already too much. Let me know if you have any other thoughts of what could happen... thanks
According to Google guidelines, Google's crawl just follow links on any web page up to 100. It ignores the remaining links but all the links are more than expected..google will banned your site.
At any point of doing this, did it not seem a little spammy to you? Remove the links then file a re-inclusion request.
How about just linking to the pages that are relevant. Update: your reduction in traffic might not be because of your linking. the guides section, where do you get the content? did you copy it from somewhere? That might be problem, you copied someone else's content.
If your website is really baned form Google and no pages are indexed then thre is almost no way to get your website back on track. You can try to write google, but it will take ages or maybe even never till you get response. But in your case with that big site I would register new domain. Transfer all content to the new site(except nasty internal linking) and start from there. Of course you will lose links, but it is better than having nothing
@oseymour: It did not look spammy to me... since I have seen it many sites, however maybe I was just too lazy to think about it. And we have 100% original unique content, really - each article is checked with CopyScape so that cannot be a reason. @Ledlauzis: Wow, your new domain idea is more than strange to me... I do doubt that would be a good idea.. also our sites are still indexed and they also appear among the search results just on very bad positions (300~400). Anyhow thanks for your feedback!
Interlinking is good, dynamic interlinking is good also (as long as the keywords make sense). I have one such site monitored (with about 20 dynamic links generated to other internal pages) , and it is ranked fine (it is completely white-hat, and user-friendly site, though).
Our opinion: 1) Internal linking is fine. Amazon and Ebay have several blocks with random items - this is just what you had on your site. And they still rank well 2) Linking your several sites is also fine. Look at Amazon or EBay again: they mention their other projects in footer.
Hi all, I am not sure if I accentuated that I have added the backlinks 3 months ago and I got sandboxed only some weeks before. @SeoServe: I think you're right, but the idea is that I cannot compare our site to Ebay or Amazon (yet ). This is something we have experienced before, it's also up on your trust what you can do and what you can't. I have removed the backlinks so now waiting to see any results... Thanks all.
This is not entirely correct. Sites of ebay/amazon are treated by the same Google's algorithm. In the contrary, I learned a lot by studying those sites (For example, the stupid fact of putting one's logo at the top left, with a link to site's root)