Wow, huge drop.. I would say stay with what you're doing, just change some stuff up. (link selling / link farms)
That is a big drop - sorry to hear that you suffered that. Is your site still ranking in the SERPs ?? Are you still getting the same amount of traffic ???
Site seems to be getting around the same amount of traffic. Maybe 80% of previous levels. To be honest I can't provide better stats because my host turned off all the statistics software - kept crashing the server. (it's a dedicated box) At the moment (peak hour) there are about 359 users and guests online. Usually there is around 410 at this time of day. (This is from the who's online bar at the bottom of vbulletin.) I might take the advice above and remove the sponsored links and pray for the best. Although some links will still pay because they are legitimate advertisements which are contextually tied to the content of the site. I do notice it is appearing less readily in search results for keywords it used to dominate. Maybe the full ramifications are yet to be observed. Links were seperated with a '|' and used to read: 'Sponsored links' above where they start. I have since removed the latter part. I am contemplating attempting an invisible div full of inbetween content and some tricky css to line the links up. I can stop google from downloading my css file by checking useragent with modrewrite. Anyone think this will help?
I am not totally convinced that your site was penalized heavily for selling links. Lots of high profile sites that were manually penalized did not have their PR dropped completely to zero. One thing to look out for is whether some of your inner pages have PR. If so, this would indicate that the problem is of a technical nature on Google's part. In any case, your PR may come back after the next update. The above is a good idea, it may even be better to place your links in the body of the text rather than the usual areas such as headers/footers/sidebars. My experience is that most link buyers do not leave immediately and you do have several months' leeway.
I just checked. Some of the inner pages do have pagerank. So maybe it is technical? *slight glimmer of hope?* Damn it I need to remember my Google webmasters login so I can find out what the hell is going on...
I have been all over the place this year, and it bites. Around 2nd QTR of this year, my 7 year old site dropped SERPS and traffic from Google dropped to 1/10th of what it had been the day, weeks and months before. This "punishment" lasted for 6 months, almost to the day, and then like magic, I went back to my 4th place for a keyword, from hanging out in 40-70 range for 6 months. With that change, my site traffic increased 3 fold overnight. Then, due to recent PR related to my site topic, my site skyrocketed. I have a PR7 site, and it remained PR7 the entire time all year long. Even with news of a week or so ago with PR changing and people complaining, I was still at PR7. My site:mydomain.com index results where hanging round the same, 180,000 or so. While my stats are all out of wack because of the PR stuff this week, I decided to see if I was still holding my regained SERPS as it has only been a week or so and YES I was. I then checked index results and what? 25,000? Down from 180,000? I then did a site:mydomain.com/forum and low and behold, 80,000. WHAT? So I started checking and it seems like Google's number is out of whack. So, then... see you all talking about PR changes, I checked mine... ZERO. Hopefully this is all technical and not a change. But, as long as I keep SERPS and my regained traffic, my PR can be -123123123. I don't sell links.
Sythe, you should try again - some times pr tools are are fucked up when you don't use http or www. Anyhow, my new 3 websites a live for 2 months and got from pr0 to pr3 :S
I use the google toolbar on firefox. It reports zero. That other site mentioned above reports -1. Both www and . are 0 or -1.
Nice forum. Although, with links at the bottom relating to viagra, casinos and erections, it's probably not a suprise google thought of it as a little spammy.
Look at the cache of your homepage www.sythe.org Looks very weird http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&hl=nl&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLG,GGLG:2006-14,GGLG:nl&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sythe.org%2F