Hi It seems my website was a victim of the -950 penalty in google. What i find strange is that I did not even rank well for that partcicular keyword, around 200th in the results, but we were making did get some services here in DP such as directories submissions, blog posts, blog networks in order to try to improve our rankings for the particular keyword we were penalized for. Our backlinks have always been high, over 45k so i dont think we were penalized for getting too much backlinks, specially because i have been checking often and the backlinks have not increased much, about 400-500. The site is still indexed but it is displayed on page 95 of the results. My question is why would we be penalized being that we have a lot of backlinks already, the site has over 4 years old and we did not get many backlinks at the same time... traffic is around 150-200 daily visits so i am trying to figure out why the site got penalized... Should i go to webmasters tools and submit a reconsideration? This really surprised me... specially because it is such a small website... tks
It sounds like you were buying links here. Google have been penalizing a lot of sites for selling links lately. I suppose they penalize the buyers as well.
Buying links? The blogs most of the time have 0 pagerank and are basically a compilation of small articles. Directories exist for the purpose of having links on them so you submit your site to those. If this is considered illegal by google than everyone using dp´s services will get a -950 penalty...
Are you sure you recieved a penalty for what you describe? Many people do the same thing many X times over without a scratch.
You can get a lot of links at once if you are also getting trust from such sites as CNN, Washington Post, Gov sites, authority sites, etc. That's why hot sites don't get a -950 penalty. 500 links from as directories submissions, blog posts, blog networks all at once will trip a spam filter if there is no quality mixed in there.
i am not sure.. but, sudden increase in backlinks for a site definitely raise an alarm.. Check this.. it migh help you.. http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3215939.htm
True Abhik... but I believe bogart made a very valid statement by saying that all the backlinks would be ok as long as there were enough authority sites backing them. No?
But I had over 50k backlinks total... I would guess that anything bellow 2k backlinks at once it is a drop in the ocean... I went ahead and emailed google asking what happened. I did not rank well for the keyword as i said, so i dont see a point to raise flags. A couple of competitors for this particular keyword buy links from 3 different websites related to html, and they sell sunglasses... All 2 competitors are ranked top5 for the keyword sunglasses... i ranked 180... Google is really weird sometimes, i hope i can get a reply from them. tks