I run a web site called thebaseballcube.com and have established the site as one of the more popular baseball web sites on the Internet. I used to be well entrenched in Google but after the last Google update, I have found my site to have a lot of pages de-indexed or moved down in the rankings. I'm not certain as to the reason but someone mentioned that sites with a lot of outgoing links are penalized. I sell a lot of advertizing for text links on my web site and if you look in my footer on the home page of my site, you'll see I have about 64 links for an advertiser which I am afraid might be affecting my rankings. The site gets a lot of direct hits without search engines but traffic can double with my old rankings in tact. Does anyone have any advice for me on what I should do about these footer links and whether I should cut off this advertiser (its a monthly deal so I can stop anytime) or maybe it has nothing to do with this. Any help would be greatly appreciated. (Hope this is the right place to put my question!)
I doubt the too many links theory. It just doesn't seem to hold up. I think its that you have lots of links to unrelated sites. For example, what has "Koi Food", "Romantic Candles", or "Isreali Flower" got to do with baseball? Read what he has to say about it here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/ Especially this part:
# of outgoing link has no effect on your SEPR, i don't think the de-index has anything to do with it. Google will only devalue to link if there is too many link on page and unrelated site
Almost similar situation to this thread, http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=86819 http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=96259 I think Nintendo, also mentioned about something.. hmm. Nintendo, where are u?
I read the Matt Cutts article and so I decided to remove all unrelated ads from my site to see the effect. I wish I knew that it would have an immediate effect but in reality, it could be months. I will take a big hit this year for not having this advertiser but I would rather have a clean site with related links and more traffic rather than play with google... They supply me with a lot of traffic and new "regular visitors" to my site and so I would like to play by their rules whether I agree with them or not.
I hear you. Google is annoying me more and more lately. This bit about the unrelated links says to me, "We're not very good at determining what really is and isn't related, so you better make it blatantly obvious or we'll de-index you. Oh, and forget about indexing all the worlds information...we're only going to index it after enough people have linked to your site; otherwise we're not going to bother spidering more than a couple of pages. So, if you have anything important to say, say it in on your index page and don't bother trying to categorize it for easy navigation. We understand that we're the 900 pound gorilla in the room, and that we handle 60% of all search traffic, and that often people use a search engine even when they know the url they want to go to, but ignore the fact that we're here, build your site's for visitors, and don't try to participate in any link scheme that might bring you traffic without using a search engine." Sorry, I'll get off my rant now.
I agree...one of my sites has a ton of links on the homepage, but they ALL have something to do with the subject matter of my site. I haven't noticed any type of penalization from Google since it's been up for the last 4 years.