All the sites now only come up in Google if I search for their exact URL. Most used to rank on page 1 for their terms. Here's why I think I could've been penalized: 1) Using mostly CAPS in the Titles and somewhat spamming the title. Ex: FREE ARCADE GAMES, FREE FLASH GAMES, PLAY ARCADE GAMES 2) Interlinking the arcades in groups of 5. In other words 5 arcades would interlink to each other with each having a maximum of 5 or 6 links. (i.e. I didn't link all 200 together just linked in small groups) 3) All contact & privacy policy pages were the same for each site. The titles for these pages were the same too. I used rel=nofollow and robots to block these pages from search engines. NOTE: 0 bought/sold links, no directory submissions, absolutely positively 0 link exchanges outside of my own sites What do you think?
I swear to you that it did! At some point on Sept. 15th all my sites suddenly got penalized. I can see it in the traffic numbers and in earnings. The one common factor is that they were all using Adsense and, as Google TOS asks for, they all had Contact & Privacy Policies (that were identical).