Just got penalized BADLY for a stupid mistake I should have noticed. *Ouch*

alright, thanks for the help everyone. Google has struck me down, but I shall arise stronger than before.

ahaha

 

Contrary to what some other people have said, linking to your homepage from all inner pages can get you penalised if and only if you use a keyword you're targetting as the anchor text in the link. However this is not called a penalty as such, it's called Over Optimisation Penalty (OOP) which is basically a filter which lowers your SERPs. The good thing about filters is that you can get your SERPs back by taking a step back, ie, undoing your changes. I'd be keen to hear whether your anchor text has always been "home" or "bad drivers today" or something.

 

i dont think so. because i have seen many sites has link to home in the home page. also as a example joomla CMS usually has this

 

This is just impossible - I have a link to the front page on all my sites - so is everybody. And in most cases the links is there on the front page as well.

 

yep even i have and seen many websites who have their home page link at their LOGO....this certainly isn't true

 

I have a link to my homepage from my homepage and my site is still on Google...

http://gamejumble.com

The links on the top. One link is to the homepage...

 

I guess this is not the issue.
You have very low content on your posts. Try to add more description about the videos and see if anything changes.

 

you won't get penalized for having a link to your home page on your home page. I have one and I never got penalized. I use master pages with aspx, so the home link just shows up on all pages.

 

It really varies, but it is not uncommon. It all depends on where your "natural" ranking should be. Look at some of the sites around yours in the results. Does it look like you are in the right neighborhood (in terms of content, links, age, etc...)?

 

Linking to your homepage with "home" as anchor will not get you penalised but linking using a keyword will. If you're brave enough, then you can test it yourself

 

Don't worry dude everything will be ok, contact google via webmaster control panel.

 

A link at the bottom of all of your pages isn't going to result in all pages being penalized. You need to keep looking.

 

Oh, I must have got the OOP, I guess I didn't mention the link to my homepage had 2 of my targeting keywords in the anchor text... well it's been removed so just gotta wait to get my site looked at again by googlebot..

 

Exactly what i thought then

Like i said, the good news is that if you revert back to how it was before, you will get your rankings back. Let me know how it goes...

 

Dont get too worried, it happens to 80 percent of website, has google is updating all of their algo, so therefore if u rank page one before u go backwards. it will all come back to its original position or go even further more

 

Thats not the reason you got penalised , i got the homepage link on my homepage so its ok.

 

fluctuations indexed by google

 

Your site was sandboxed because its new. Nothing to do with penalties and Google don't penalize because a footer link.

 

That is strange, wouldnt of though google would of done that.

 

it was because my footer link had 3 keywords in it and was linking to my home page.

I think it's starting to get better, I checked my rankings yesterday and im in the 60's or so now. So I somehow got out of the sandbox (If I was even in it) and then I also removed another link that linked to my blog that had keywords (similiar to the one I removed at first)

So hopefully I will get my rankings and a majority of my traffic back soon.