Hi all, I got banned by Google. Here is what happened: I added 24 dynamic footer links to all of my pages (~15K) 3 months ago. These links were pointing to internal pages, all from the same section of my site (directory). The whole section got banned (the traffic decreased with 96%!). These 24 links are selected randomly of 180 ; so they differ page to page but from a set of 180 link totally. I have these footer links on 15,000 pages of mine. These links were set up from one day to the other - I think this caused the whole problem. I got banned at the 5th of January. My question is what should I do know? Should I get rid of those links as soon as possible? Do any of you have experiences with Google bans caused by massive (internal) linking? Should I just wait? Any help is appreciated!
Did you happen to get this directly from Google webmaster tools or google analytics at all? Just curious as to where you are pulling this information from.
Delete those internal links from your footer and wait to see if something will happen with your website.
Think this is all you can do. I read somewhere that google does not like internal linking. I think if you have all your websites hosted by the same company , then this is what google detects.
Hi... zlori i read your post now the issues is your site in live or not. its in live means know issues just you want to remove that spam link which you mention in your post, when you type your URL you cant see your site its so some red color warring means just remove your google web master coding and create new coding and place it and also follow your malware warring which is in your web master tool.... I am not sure its right way its just my opinion its wrong means just update me guys.....
Hey guys, Thanks for the feedbacks.. @MattSanti: I have the traffic data from Google Analythics. My internal tracking shows the same and I see my sites does not appear for keywords for what they were on the 1st position. @shadow689: thanks, I think I will remote the links. What scares me is if it took 3 months to get the ban it might take other 3 months to get rid of it? @glacey: All sites are from the same domain (internal links in the sense of the word that they point to the same domain). Interlinking helped us really much in the past, I think this time it just was too much of them.. @seoiwc2010: the pages are live; no malware, no red colored warning messages... Further comments are welcome!
Google does not like internal linking, at all.....I have several clients for SEO, and I learned this the hard way - like you Best to start all over again.
Remove those links and carry on with your link building process. It might take a long time but you'll ultimately get all your traffic back again!
Wait a second. We do use internal linking inside our sections and it helped a lot (PR2--4 each second page we have; also indexing new pages go pretty fast). I think the problem here was that we added these links from one day to the other... but internal linking helps a lot.
That sucks man. Google really likes websites to be easy to navigate and natural (ex: categories, etc...) I think the dynamic linking was a big red flag. I'd definitely delete the dynamic footer, and give it some time. Sorry to hear that happened.
Google is fine with internal linking. Internal linking from within your text copy to other related pages on your website is a good thing to do. Just be sure it's natural and not spammy. Be more sparing in your footer links; just use links to your main pages.
You have clients you do SEO work for and you think Google doesn't like internal linking? Sometimes I read things and just wince. I suggest you look up the benefits of Internal linking and Google's policies on them. I have no idea what caused this Google slap for the OP, it could be from the 'mass' linking or the software used, but Google loves internal linking generally.
Finally, you have me a thought... so do you think it would be fine if I would link to only 24 pages from all the footers...? I mean 24 static link... I would like to give some importance to the banned section, still...
I suppose that would work. Personally, from all my footers I link only to two pages — my home page and my site map. But there's no reason to limit that number to those two. However, 24 pages still seems like a lot of pages to link to from every footer. Do you have 24 pages that are that important, rather than a few major pages to which to direct attention, PR, etc.? And then from those major pages link out to more pages, etc., etc.
- Do you do things that Google does not agree such as outside SEO (back linking)? If you did clear SEO keep silence, you won´t want your life to be analysed and get a worse penalty. - Do you think there are things that you, as a search engine would not like? If so, remove them - Let´s say I am a GOogle robot and crawl your site. Today I visit it and get links A,B,C, follow them and keep crawling. Then I come back to visit your site and A,B,C links does not exist, but X,Y,Z. Then I do it for the 3rd time and AGAIN. 'Why does it change so much? I shouldn´t trust something changing all the time (only normal blog updates I should).' At least I would consider removing you from any good Google positions (like sandbox). If you believe there was nothing wrong remove this crazy system (sorry for that word), believe me, that´s bad for a search engine as described above and contact Google, on Webmaster tool you have access to directly contact Google, explain your case and it can be reconsidered. I´ve seen ban stories and it should be back naturally in 3 months after the ban, but your ranking will start again from the bottom and should take a little longer. Take care, I wish you are able to solve that contacting Google.
Internal links are as good as keyword placement. Use for effectiveness and not randomly slap the same links in many times per page.
Thanks again for your ideas! I might link to 10-12 additional pages I think. The idea is, what maybe I did not mention before, that this is about a pretty large site having 20K+ indexable and useful pages. @Camarao - that would be right, but the thing is that I have long and content-rich pages having 100+ links (and still PR3-4), so the 'A-B-C' links would be only 20-25% of the total links. Also, the same technique works pretty fine inside my sections; I mean I have a section called travel tips. From each page inside this section I link 10 other pages from this section, selected randomly. @Promoman - I do not link the same page more times from a page. Thanks all, I will remove the footer link and I will leave 10 static links there then after some while I will let you know how it goes...
hi there, I had the same problem I guess. After following some SEO software package advise to put divisional comments under keyword, google did not put me into the list. But bing and yahoo are ok. I am thinking what the best to do to get back into Google. Thanks Desi Kudi http www. cheapindiacallingcards. .net
Sorry to hear that. I heard from an SEO guru that linking between sites you own is a big NO-NO. It's probably fine (and even good) if you have a dozen or fewer sites (I'm guessing) but when you have 15,000 pages, google sees exactly what you're trying to do and it doesn't like it. Google sees patterns. If your links are obviously patterned, and you're BIG, I think you're risking it.
Also, You should do a site inclusion request through tool in Google Webmaster Tools whenever you fix the actual problem. A bit of advice, just make sure you don't have blatantly obvious paid links showing as someone from Google goes through those.