Hello! Due to excessive link selling (mostly gambling) on one of my websites, google has penalized me and changed my pagerank from 5 to 0 - sitewide. Did anybone of you experience in a situation like this? Now that I have removed these links, do you have an Idea when will I get my PR back, if at all?
Certainly not til the next update (quarterly, usually) and almost certainly longer.... but what does it matter? PR is meaningless, are are you seeing a drop in the serps / less visitors?
You will have to build trust back up with google. This could take awhile depending on how long it takes you to build links "naturally" What kind of sites were you posting on?
My question - Do your site still have an indexed pages and link popularity in Google? If yes, your site still has a chance to get some PR back after those links removed. However, it cannot be predicted or guaranteed for PR5 back, it may be 1-3 but better than zero anyway. I assume your site is not has any relative to gambling. That's why your outgoing links are easily to be identified as selling links. If no, your site has been banned already. You need to file re-inclusion request to Google, otherwise your site will not being visited by Googlebots for lifetime.
link selling is OK as long as you keep it to minimum and do it under the table. selling to many links will get you in trouble as Google will figure it out over time. just be careful form now on and keep the link selling to minimum. also, if you are selling links, then it is wise to sell links to similar sites or sites that complement your site. if you sell links to all kind of irrelevant sites, then it doesn;t make sense to anyone and doesn;t make sense to Google either
If your site still are indexed in Google, then you can rebuild trust back with google by building links naturally and slowly. It takes time, just be patient.
Hey. In answer to your questions: Yes. My site is still fully indexed (>4000 pages). Google still sends 600 visitors a day... just like before the penalty (even slightly higher). But all of the income from the website was by selling gambling links... I did exaggarate a bit though... the gambling sites were willing to pay big cash for such a high quality unique website and it was certainly worth it... Well whatever. All sold gambling links have now expired and I wait to gain PR again. Actually I can't wait for my PR to get back up so that I could sell more - as I can see no other use for PR. Thanks for your answers folks.