Hello I had good rankings a month ago, but suddenly I went down to ~500. I found out that I had a link to a banned site. The link was on my index page, now I removed it and the question is then google will restore my rankings? Anyone have any experience with that ? thanks
How long has your site been up? More than likely you are still in googles sandbox and your results will not be steady they will go up and down while google figures out if your site is popular even when it doesnt juice your site in the top of the rankings. If you still get steady traffic google will figure this out and rerank you highly eventually. Just keep getting backlinks to your site. I wouldnt think linking to one banned site would harm you.
the site old. I was ranking very good a month ago but as i said suddenly rankings went down. When I added a link to that site it was not banned.. but now it seems its banned so I removed the link and I hope to get my rankings back then google will crawl and cache the index page again.
this happened to my with an old site as well- I thought I couldnt get a penalty but my traffic got pretty low. I was linking to a couple of bad sites and i removed the links - within 2 weeks things were back to normal. Its always hard to say that my removing the links caused the rebound in traffic- perhaps it was something else, but thats my personal experience.
Removed the link yesterday now waiting for google to cache the page without that link. I hope the things will get better.
I don't think I've ever linked to a banned site as I usually require a site to have back links in Google before I give them a link.
You can't predict which site is going to be banned and whether that partiucular site was banned from google etc. Google won't penalise you for linking to banned site. Penalised site will have low PR...
I disagree with most of this. You do have to be very careful which sites you link to. Google explicitly states in their Webmaster Guidelines, "In particular, avoid links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links." http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 A bad neighborhood is a banned or heavily penalized site. Today, it's typically a site that is not indexed by G. I've seen spammy or duplicate content sites that Google would not index. Usually it's a mature site with nothing more than the home page in G's index. Sometimes, there are zero pages in G's index. But sometimes that happens merely because G's algorithm scews up. It's can sometimes be hard to tell if a site has been penalized. I personally experienced a drop of 30 rank positions across-the-board on one of my sites when I linked to a friend's site without first checking the site. It was one of those boilerplate GoDaddy domain reseller sites. Approximately 30 days after discovering the problem and removing the link, my rank positions popped back. It can be very difficult to tell when G applies penalties to a site today, but you can think of it as inheriting part of the penalty applied to a site. The current G philosophy is that while you cannot control who links to your site, you have full control over who you link to. You therefore have to be very careful who you link to. Any page with strong rankings and a good PR is a safe bet.
Thanks for a great post. "my rank positions popped back" it happend right after the google cached the page without a link to a bad site ?
What does google call a bad site? What about a forum full of free credit cards and paypals like cc-rules(dot)com ?