I have two sites related to a similar niche. For the purpose of this post, lets say one is related to "Widget Hats" and the other is related to "Widgets". I have used the exact same strategy for building links to both sites. Up until a month ago, both sites where ranking on page 1 on Google for their respective keywords. Then, all of the sudden the site related to "Widgets" got slapped down to the 5th page, then the 15th page, and now it sits on the 21st page of Google for its keyword. Meanwhile, the site related to "Widget Hats" is ranking on the 4th page for "Widgets" and is still ranking on page 1 for "Widget Hats". What the heck is going on here? Should I just combine both sites with a redirect, or do you think that Google will pass the penalty to both sites if I do that. Do you think google is just filtering out the site on "Widgets" since it figured out that both sites are related. Any help is appreciated.
"widgets" and "widget hats" are two different keywords, they both have different competition. You cant compare them to each other.
Hello, I think you can find this one useful, very useful -> http://www.seomoz.org/blog/anchor-text-distribution-avoiding-over-optimization And try to check this one out also http://www.seomoz.org/blog/strategic-link-building-why-you-dont-need-to-outrun-lions
Are these brand new domains ? What kind of links are you building to them ? How fast are you building them ? We need to know a lot more info before we can help you out. However, I would say do not stop building links. Just don't build the wrong links, like you can social book mark until you're blue in the face, but it will only give you very limited seo benefit.
If Google can tell both sites are yours, and you're cross linking them in any way, they will slap your higher competition keyword site and let you have your more specific site, if you're lucky. Widget Hats seems like a unique product, Widgets is probably a niche so oversaturated and you haven't added truly unique content and Google is suspecting you're just a spammer or something. What you should do is separate the sites as much as you can but take your best content from Widgets, freshen it up (do not copy paste...), and put it on Widget Hats. You can try to wait to regain rank, or you can juice up your site that is not being targeted.