Hello, I had a sitewide links for about ~10 sites on one of my sites.. These sites share a specific purpose. E.g. all are about news and have "news" keyword as second part of the domain name. But after reading a little bit, i decided to remoe them from the site. Sinceall those sites are on different topics although their aim is same. But although i have a PR increase in this update my traffic dropped consireablly ( i lost ~1000 unique visitors daily) This is happeneing for 3-4 days. Do you think this is a temporary issue (may be beacue of PR update) or any possibility of having this because of removing those sitewide links? If you think this is because of removing links, can i rescue the istuation by re-adding those links? By the way, i had more than 7500 pages indexed in that site. Some of them had counted as backlinks for those sites and now it seems that Google detected that i removed the links. By the way, %90 of my traffic is coming from Google. Thanks for the replies..
It is not happened because you deleted your sitewide links. If you link to related sites, It is good for you and for visitors and also for google. But if you link to unrelated sites which are maybe banned or some spammy sites, you could see some dropping in rankings But only if you have tons of bad outbound links. Few can't hurt anybody. If you see some drops in rankings, it could be because of G update, you may be penalized if you used some bad technics or just your competitors do some seo and boost their rankings. Always watch what your competition is doing
In fact, for that site, there is no active competitor in the area i am working.. I am getting traffic for lots of very specific questions/problems. So i really dont think that someone has passed me on that source of traffic.. One thing i forgot to mention is that those 10+ (actually 20+ ) sites were residing on the same server! Is there a high probability for getting this result because of adding 20+ links for the sites residing on the same server?
If all sites are yours, I wouldn't link from one to others. Because if you exchange links between 2 your sites, this is ok, but if Google sees pattern of 20+ links this could be serp manipulation. You can link from every sites to hub (your biggest site) and from hub to other sites. This is let's say ok version.
Hmm. I see. Thanks for clarification. In fact my aim was to create a network of sites. Lets say two networks of sites: X, Y. My hub is in X and what i did previously is to add both X and Y sites as separate link blocks to all sites! (e.g. with titles "X Network" and "Y Network") Now i am only linking inside networks. So X sites link each other and Y sites link each other. Do you think this scheme is still dangerous? (Note that domain names has a common word for the sites in any of the networks) Do you think this is still dangerous? If so i think there is a problem in Google's algorithm since the sites in the same network share a similar theme but in different topics. For example assume that i have a video network the site urls in the video network will look like this: funny-videos.com , serious-videos.com , tech-videos.com ... In fact in this way, i transferred PR5 to 5+ sites in the same network from my hub which was PR5 too.. I think Google detects the pattern in domain-names and give value instead of penalty.. What do you think?