I've read a few times that if you over optimise your site you can get banned - I'v recently seen a drop-off of visiters from google and I'm wondering if this has happended. Anybody know if they've ever been penalized for over-optimization?
Unless you have done things like hiding text on your site, it is unlikely that you have "over-optimized". This is one of those things that is talked about a lot, but doesn't usually happen to anyone.
You can get your site penalized for getting to much links to fast. Specially if all the links have the same anchor text. It already happened to me once, I pointed to much coop weight to one site, with one anchor text at once and the site began to drop in the serps. It is hard to get penalized by that though, I mean, I was adding a massive amount of weight to that site. A normal link building campaign will not trigger that filter.
I have a site going from a PR0->PR6 simple because have that much weight in my network. Would a site going for those rankings get penalized as such or what is your opinion on that?
Not necessarily. If you buy a couple of links from pr8 sites your site will probably be pr6 on the next update, and you will need only 2 or 3 links, so its not related with pr. My site got around 10,000 links in about a week or two. That was definitely too much
Yeah, I'm only at around 3,000 links and that's been over 6 months or so. I can hold up to about 5,000 links if I fully link all my sites to a single domain. Going from 0->10,000 is, yes, probably a little too much
So, you think its the number of links, getting too many will get googlebot all exited? huh, i'll keep that in mind