Due to some site-wide links my site gets over 1,000 new backlinks everyday. Site is 3,5 years old, PR5, 150k pages are in index. 3 days ago all my SERP positions were dropped down to 100+ and traffic was decreased in 10 times. But all the pages are in the index. So should I delete all these site-wide backlinks or just to wait and add more strong reputable links? Thanks.
the thing about sitewide, is that they are easily recognized by google as "non editorial links", if you get a sitewide you must have bought it, or you own the website which is linking to you, or in some cases it's a link exchange, so sidewides are not "natural" links, you shouldn't get penalized because of them.. but avoid getting sitewides and try to get in-content and relevant links from related pages.
Thanks. But what do I have to do now? To cancel them or just to wait? I'm afraid that if I cancel the situation may bacome worse...
u can try removing the links then submitting a reconsideration request in google webmasters. i honestly dont think that site wide links hurts you. it may be because of another reason. try to diagnose any problems in google webmasters
You are penalized by Google for un-natural link growth which indicates towards link buying. You must surely reduce and minimize the symptoms which are responsible for this penalty. If it is in your control you must stop the growth of similar links with same anchor text or description and stop paying for it instantly if you do it in any way. You may still be penalized even more as the symptoms are still available. be prepared for that as well and in the same time try to delete the un-natural links. After you are sure you are done check your losses and wait, then your SERPs will be build again. Not as slowly as they were made originally, but still it is quite good period of waiting.
Wait a couple of days. Google is doing strange things at the moment while it tries to get normal google and caffein in tandem. I've had one of my sites go from 15 to 3 to 38 for one of it's keywords in a single day. Site wide links shouldn't harm you at all.
As Funkymario said, Google is NOT going to penalize you for having sitewide links on other sites pointing to your home page for instance. Sitewide links are likely devalued but inbound links as a general rule cannot hurt your rankings regardless of how they are obtained. Google can't prove YOU asked for the links. If they handed out penalties regularly for inbound links then I could put all of my competitors out of business by getting building links to their sites and then reporting them. NOT going to happen. Google VERY RARELY penalizes sites for buying links UNLESS you are stupid enough to get caught bragging about it on the Google Help Forums using your WMT account. But short of that they typically go after the sellers of links, and even this is tough to prove unless they are advertising that they are selling links on their site or using a link broker who lets people see their inventory of sites where links can be placed online. In the event that Google discovers someone IS selling links, they will penalize the URL at the other site where a paid link appears (i.e. they penalize the seller's URL or entire site if bad enough). The buyer is only penalized indirectly because they continue to pay for the link be get no SEO benefit from it. With blogs it is quite possible to gain site-wide links naturally because of people creating blogrolls that point to your site because they like it and want to share some of their favorite sites. My blog has a blogroll with a few links to other relevant sites that I frequent... and they are natural site-wides. But they are likely tremendously devalued if they carry any value at all.
Thanks for your great posts, guys. Surely when I see that each day I get over 1k new backlinks (mostly they are links from inner pages with low PR) I feel nervous... I'm afraid that if I start deleting backlinks Google will suppose that all of them are paid and then I can get more problems...
Get, Back links from higher PR relevant sites, do care of lesser OBL's and different IPs. This helps you rank soon.
Thank you all. To the point, I have fount another unpleasant moment... some of the site-wide links are linked with each other so it becomes like small link wheels - A->B->C->A... can it be the reason for penaltising too? Should I broke these small link rings or it's dengerous for the site?
hi. I've quoted my last post to give you a demonstration of my point. I'm back up to 11 today. Google really is playing up. Don't worry about it. When you're next cached you should go back to normal. In regards to the linking. As the gentleman who made the long post above pointed out, you cannot be penalised for backlinks. Only outgoing links. This has been confirmed recently by google engineer Matt Cutts. The only possible problem that could arise is if the sites linking to you are registered as yours, or running on the same server as yours, as it would look like blatant manipulation on your behalf. Saying that though, i've got three sites that are all site wide linked to each other through their respective main menu's, and they've never been penalised. My advice would be to keep building links and don't worry. It'll fix itself. As an after thought, have you checked to see if your site wide backlinks have recently been made no follow?
Thanks for your great and optimistic post. Surely, I have checked all my backlinks - they don't use nofollow, thanks God. Next, as for outgoing links - I was saying in my last post that I have found that my site with other some site-wide backlinks create several so-called "link rings" linking each other - A->B->C->A. Surely Google can define it easily. From the other side, other sites who are linked with me by "rings" feel good - no Google penalties, etc.
If i understand you correctly, you're saying that you have sitewide outgoing links? That would take far more investigation. I'm on my way out now, but if you want to pm me your domain and the two other sites i'll go through them in a few hours when i'm back to see if there are any obvious problems.
I dont think any kind of link building can be the cause of a rank drop, even if it were overnight, monstrous backlink growth. If that were hypothetically true, then any of your competitor can buy links to your site from all over splogs and then google will drop your rank. So the drop is not because of backlink growth explosion, it is because of other causes.