One of my sites has been riding a roller coaster for the past 5 months. For a month or so it'll rank high for my main keywords, and others, and then for a month the rankings drop for the main keywords and dissapear for all others. After scratching my head over this behaviour I think I figured out that it might be the plain html links to my advertisers, repeated over and over again on every page of the site, and two others, in the same order and with the same wordy text, that may be getting the site penalized for duplicate content. I suspect the links because I have another site that is very similar, but that doesn't have the same collection of links, and the rankings don't remotely fluctuate as much. I think I need to hide the links from the search engines. Should I turn them into image links, or hide them with javascript, or should I maybe rotate the links and the link text? Any thoughts?
ya lets try hide it and then see how will it fluctuate this time. I also want to see how it turns out.
I'm a big fan of rotating text links. DP uses it successfully so perhaps you can follow a proven method.
If you need to hide the links to your advertisers (ethically, mind you), just add rel="nofollow" to the links you don't want the search engines to follow. But make sure you first check with your advertising partners to ensure this does not violate their TOS before doing so.