Now that inspires confidence!! I had the grave misfortune to watch a Faux News docudrama about climate change. It began with a narrator saying the words "Global warming: most Americans believe it's real." Their star, Bill O'Reilly claims to have won two Peabody awards for his work on tabloid show Inside Edition. So if your site is much like Fox News, I guess I should thank you for pointing that out before I spent any of my time looking at it.
Ok, first, I don't have all of the answers, but I will take a stab at this. I'm finding it hard to figure out the exact sequence of events or specific sites, but one does stick out that I see. Please correct me if I have this particular one wrong: 1) There is a large real estate webmastering community, many of whom are all interlinked with each other. 2) Someone in the real estate webmastering community tells all of their clients that they should remove all link partners immediately, in no uncertain terms. 3) Many do so. 4) mslasvegasrealestate.com is one of the sites that does, and they do not tell their link partners. 5) There is a big shakeup in the real estate serps. Instead of blaming it on the fact that the whole linking structure shifted due to a mass removal of linking pages, people assume that it is the linking pages themselves, since someone said 8 months ago that they should remove them. 6) Months later, mslasvegasrealestate.com's link partners find out that they are in fact no longer partners, remove the links that were pointing there, and then mslasvegasrealestate.com rankings drop. Is this approximately what happened? I would need more sites of course to really investigate, and preferably before and after shots of the link structures. As far as I can tell though, you guys did not even look for another possible reason, you just all (aside from your resident seo guru) started agreeing that it must be the recip pages and fed off of each other. Am I wrong there? Again, sorry, I am not trying to be condescending or anything, and please let me know if I did miss stuff... but that's just what it is looking like to me. By the way, mslasvegasrealestate.com is not gone, they are at about #70. That's not really indicative of a penalty, that's more of a dip... the kind you find in normal day to day Google tweaking. If you want to see what people are calling penalties, you should check out the -950 penalty. If a site is hit for spamming, then they usually get banned, and at that point the only option is a reinclusion request. Also, you might need to all re-check your rankings... a new algo started rolling out today that might have caused another shift. Nope, I'm saying that a) a drop in rankings is not the same as a penalty, and b) that whatever drops there were did not have to do with the fact of having recipricol links pages in and of themselves. Peace. -Michael
Does that mean new sites will experience this until they get good quality backlinks? I"m experiencing the same thing. Today i noticed that 80% of the pages went to the supplemental results. All contents are original, well optimized meta tags, no blackhats. Google had issues a couple of months ago where vanessa fox mentioned that there are acutually glitches on their system causing some of the sites' pages to go to the supplemental results but were fixed after a month
It's not just about quality, it also has to do with structure, but yes, it is a link thing and not a duplication thing. It does not have to do with content. -Michael
Yes. No you are not wrong. Another site I can give you as an example removed all reciprocal links, notified all link partners, and then did a “Remove URL†for all state pages in Google. This site dropped over 150 positions in rankings for one of its main keyword phrases in less than 72 hours. Which would also be the primary KW phrase that ALL of his link partners were using as Anchor Text before they all removed his links. Now I would expect a drop or dip in the rankings due to loss of this many links with the same Anchor Text but I would not think that it would have happened this fast. Your thoughts please mvandemar? I am elated I was of service Forrest. Our Forum is at capacity for Liberals anyway. ~VegasMack
DOH! Hey, I'm a liberal! So why are you the one with the conspiracy theories? Hmm. Well, I guess it would depend on how many of those links were strong enough to make a difference. Generally speaking, stronger links mean that the pages they are on will get spidered more often, which would mean that Google would pick up on them faster. 72 hours is pretty fast though. Did the guy who used the URL removal tool have many deep links to the pages that he removed...? What percentage of his site went bye bye over night? -Michael