Is having too many internal links a bad thing? I'm trying to figure out if I got penalized or not... I have a new forum that is only 4 months old. I have one section dedicated to RSS feeds. The RSS feed bot has made over 10,000 posts over the past 4 months. At the bottom of each one of those posts is a signature. The signature includes a picture with a link to the forum and below the picture is a text link that links to the homepage. Is this being looked at as spam or something? For the past few months if I googled “video game forums†without the quotes, my page would show up on the second, sometimes third page. Now, its showing up on the seventh page!! Am I being penalized for too many internal links? Or spam? Please let me know what you think I should do!! If you want to check it out for yourself, the RSS section of the forums is at http://www.gamersthrone.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=27
No, I mean if you check the RSS section of my forum, there is an RSS bot that posts the messages. At the bottom of each post there is a signature with a link to the home page and a link to the forum page. So there are like over 10,000 internal links now pointing to my home page and forum page that are all coming from this RSS section. My page has dropped like 6 pages in SERP and I'm trying to figure out why
RSS is an outside call function and has no effect on your links. They are links located on the feed site, so they shouldn't effect you. Not OT say that Google has not finally "Gotten Evil" and tripped you up there, but generally that should not be the case. serp is calculated over a given time frame. Something else you did or did not do in the past effected it and it is hard to say just what that may be.
BadBoyzStudioZ, Yes, but the RSS fees are posted on the forums as actual posts. Just as I am posting this message on this forum now. And at the bottom of those posts are signatures with links in them that link to the forum page and home page. I just want to make sure you realize that... Nothing else has really changed... other than the fact there are a lot more of these RSS posts than there was before. I dont know what I should do. Leave them and see what happens, or turn of the signatures in that section and see what happens?
OK... I went and looked. Here is my suggestion. Quit worrying about it. Concentrate on populating your forum with members that do something and post. You are in a highly competitive market niche wise, you will bounce up and down. Don't obsess on that, make your site relevant and maintain your post/reply (especially replies) counts. That is more important and will give you solid content. RSS content or "scraping" doesn't count, it is real members that make or break that kind of site.
I totally agree with you... it's all about getting members to register and use the forums, but so far that has not been going so well. Being ranked on page 2 on Google for the phrase video game forums was slightly helping, which is why I am kind of obsessing about it. I've really been thinking about it though (about the RSS bot signature links), and I have decided that there is really no point in having those links in the signature on those forums. So I think I'll remove the links from the RSS bot signature. By doing this I figure at best it will have a positive affect and at worst it wont have any affect at all. Am I safe to assume this?
Throughout your site's life - it is going to rise and fall. I was ranked number two in a niche and I dropped 8 spots. Not sure what happened...but I kept on adding content and backlinks - in a few weeks I was back to where I was before. I know you were #2 - but relax and keep on doing what a good SEO does. You'll be back up there.