I know its a penalty.......when you rank in top 6 results for a long period of time, and suddenly each of those keywords drops to the 5th or 6th page, you know something is obviously up..... d.
See, this is what I was thinking and I did exactly what you have mentioned here a week or so back. Everyone I contacted was willing to change the anchor text for me, but there are a few issues with that as well. Many of the backlinks are from blog commenting, so those using the top commentator widgets and things like that end up having my links site wide, and some of these blogs of thousands of pages, meaning my link and anchor text were on every page of many blogs for quite some time until I stopped doing that. And then there is this situation: Which I believe does have some merrit. If I wanted, I could pop out a million backlinks to competitor websites with the same anchor text and have them penalized.......so I don't know if that is really the case. Nothing on the site is against googles guidelines. Another interesting this is that this all happend right at the same time as the new years PR update. With that update, I had an explosion in google traffic from Jan 1 to Jan 8.......thats when things went downhill. I know PR doesnt mean much, but in that PR update, the site in question when from 3 to 4, then sometime on Jan 8, traffic died and PR dropped to 2 as well. Also, with that PR update, google had also given me site links. Those are gone now, but they were there for a week or so..... dave
Dave, got any proof? I've seen this yadda yadda lots of times and Never saw a proof. Anyway, do you really understand the consequences to all the internet IF SE's allow me to create 50K spam links directed to a competitor site and De-Ranked him? Are you insane?
Scubita, what I'm saying is that I don't believe the anchor text thing is the problem. Especially based on what you have mentioned about sending of thousand of spam links. I don't think google is weak enough to allow webmasters to derank or deindex competion based on excessive back links..... essentially what I'm saying is that I aggree with you! d.
fishfinder, I am in the exact same situation a you (I commented on one of your other threads a few weeks ago). Here is my situation: my site is over 2 1/2 years old, I ranked #1 for hundreds of keywords, Google sent me around 5,000+ uniques a day, had a PR4. Then on Jan 8th - 9th my PR went from a PR4 to a PR5 but I got hit with a penalty. I now rank anywhere from 50-60 for the keywords I used to rank #1 for. After doing quite a bit of research, I believe I was hit with an over optimization penalty. Before the penalty I went on a massive link building campaign with the SAME anchor text (I know better now). Since the penalty I have requested all of the those links that I obtained be removed. Most of them have been removed and now I sit and wait. I am going to wait another few weeks before submitting a reconsideration request. And when I do submit the reconsideration request I am going to spend a lot of time on it to make sure I get it right (tell Google why I think I was penalized, what I did to fix it in detail, promise I will never do it again, etc.) While I wait it out for the next few weeks I am going to continue to add new content as well as SLOWLY build more quality links with DIFFERENT anchor text. Let me know if any thing changes for you and I will do the same. dubbs
Dubbs - Only 29 posts and already good stuff, keep it up. Intelligently written and I think you are on the right track
We would really need to take a look at the site in order to figure it out, but if it's a penalty, most of the time it's something like duplicate content, hidden text or a linking problem. (too many too fast)
Im gonna stay out of this thread: you guys can't understand that penalizations come for: a) a misunderstand b) a random glitch in algo (affects only 2-3 years top ranking sites) c) maybe and just maybe for over optimization (too many keywords along articles....) And yet again you say it's for too many link with same anchor text... tsst you guys need to learn that SE's won't penalize you for too many links: they just don't count them. And those who said they have proof, well, waiting for them. edit: as i am tired of all this shit, some of the best posters here about google and seo just moved away: this place is filled with nonsense and dangerous advices.
Lets manipulate the google!! Matt Cutts, are you scared? But in real life I'm very unhappy about this situation seeing good sites pushed down. It seems that there is nothing you can rely on - even quality content when it comes to Google. Funny... my trust to Google dropped...
Great post. Totally agree with you, there are no such thing penalty for too many backlinks in a short time or same anchor text. Google just don't count/value the link and WON'T penalize the site!
geez........all I was wondering was whether to wait out the penalty or submit a reinclusion request. I don't think it has anything to do with backlinks........ I have no idea what its related to.