Links harmed our ranking. Is it short term?

[genidude]

We recently made a foolish mistake on our web site regarding links. We innocently put a bunch of links on our site from various forums from accross the web. These links link back to our web site.

These links we place on our web site were from forums where members who posted messages about our site and their positive experience with our web site and our service to them.

It was just done as a way of letting our customers know the quality of service we provide. I'm sure Google wouldn't have penalized us if we had done it over a longer time frame.

Unfortunately, our mistake was that we added too many links too fast. I believe google saw all these new links to us so quickly that it considered it "spammy".

I can see that most of the forum postings have a PR of 0, because they are deep pages, so i figure when the Googlebot visited our site and saw all of these brand new links coming back to us, it figured we had done something black hat.

Our rankings have gone down significantly in the week or two since this occured. We have since removed those links in hopes that our ranks will return to their previous position.

My question is, will our rankings eventually revert back to the old positions after time, or is this penalty more permanent in nature?

[WDC]

Are you sure tour rankigs get affected due to linking or are there some other changes your madke in betweens same time frame.

[genidude]

I am not sure that is the reason for the drop, but it is the most likely reason.

[weslinda]

Not the most likely reason. Unless you added say, 10k links, which I'd be suprised if you did, Google won't "slam" you for it.

Other issues include some really poor coding on your site, and broken info in specific tags such as your initial Body tag.

[Invalid] Markup Validation of http://www.asedeals.com/ - W3C Markup Validator

Validation shows over 200 errors on your homepage alone, so this type of stuff is not a positive for your site in any way, shape or form.

Bring up your site quality and your site should return in rankings.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by WDC

Are you sure tour rankigs get affected due to linking or are there some other changes your madke in betweens same time frame.

I agree so many things could effect the change in rankings. Also it can just be normal fluxuations. Did you pay for these link placements?

[genidude]

Thank you for the feedback.
I understand you raising the issue of page errors and will address them.
However, The page (and site) has not been changed significantly for a long time, so I am going under the assumption that those errors have always been there.
They have not harmed our ranking in the past.
Our site has always ranked well for our desired terms.
We only made two changes recently that I would anticipate causing the drop in rankings.
One was the changes we made as previously described above.
The other was that we submitted our site to several directories.
These were smaller directories.

[genidude]

Two directories were paid placement directories.
Would Google frown upon that?
and if so, would asking the directories to remove the listing bring the rankings back up?
Or am I forever hurt by this?

[weslinda]

Genidude, but Google is always updating. So while the issues may not have caused problems in the past, the certainly could now. Also the statement that you haven't updated your site in a while is also a concern.

Content is a big key as well. New info, new items.

Did you lose other links recently? Did you buy links in bad neighborhoods? There are a number of things that could affect you, getting a few links is unlikely to be the root cause.

[incrediblehelp]

Brian no one can say for sure, only Google. It is clear Google does not like paid placements. Also it is really hard to say if these changes that were off site did anything to effect rankings.

It could be Google simply doesnt value your backlinks as it once did, thus lower your positions. Google devaluing other websites and its OBL's happens all of the time. it leaves the websites that those website are linking grasping at straws as to what happened.

[weslinda]

Brian - While the offsite things are harder to control, the onsite can be controlled and that would be something I'd encourage you to focus on. Solid changes to the current site can bring huge benefits for your organization.

[genidude]

We are always making changes to the site, just not major changes.
I would tend to think it was related to the two issues discussed earlier due to the timing of the drop.
The directories we paid for links would be Directory Vault and Pegasus.
Is there a way to determine if this is what harmed the rankings?
My main question is still unanswered - Would removing links from a bad site help bring our rankings back?
Does anybody know?
Thanks

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by genidude

Would removing links from a bad site help bring our rankings back?

All you can do is try and let us know if it works. Remember your asking for business advice in a forum which should always be taken with a grain of salt. In the case of SEO advice it should be taken with a salt block considering the amount of misinformation out there.

[genidude]

Thank you all for your input.
It is appreciated greatly.

[genidude]

I will let you know if removing our site from the paid directories helps our ranks.

[ericajoieake]

no the penalty its not permarmanent! and you have to continue and double you seo task for a better results!

[LinkMaster]

Google would not penalize a site for getting too many inbound links at once. If they did, then any of us could ruin our competitors by adding their websites to hundreds of spammy directories and link farms. Google realizes that you cannot control who links to you, so how could they penalize you for something you have no control over?

If you lost a lot of good inbound links, that is another story. Google does still weigh the number of links that are pointing to your website. But if I added a link to your website to 10,000 spammy directory pages tomorrow just because I didn't like your site - would Google or any other search engine penalize your ranking for that? It just doesn't make any sense that I (or anyone else) could have that much power over your rankings.

On the other hand, you CAN control who you link to. You can also control the content of your site. These would be the things that I would look into if I were you. Things happen. If 10 of your competitors add new content to their sites and you don't, your site could easily slip in the search engine rankings.

[weslinda]

None of us can be sure that removing those links would fix the problem, since we don't know that adding those links caused the problems. Unless someone here was a Google Engineer responsible for specifically removing your site from the directory, we couldn't honestly answer that question, as none of us can know the real reason that your site dropped.

Outside of the fact that you did these links, there is also a big discussion going on right now about a new Google update coming down. So while the timing may be interesting, it is unlikely that just those two links killed your site.

Google update anyone? - Webmaster Forums UK SEO SEM Webmaster Community Forum

Webmasters Report February 2008 SERP Changes

It would be nice if you didn't discredit the advice your being given. The overall likelihood is that those small links are not causing your drop, there are much more critical concerns regarding your site than those two things, things you have much greater control of. Google is doing a major update and your site could be a casulty, this is a much more likely concept than a couple of directory links killing your rankings.

Remember that search engines are not fans of the same old. They change and you have to change with them. That includes updating your site to follow their new whims.

[MeanSEO]

Many forums have links that "nofollow" anyhow.

Fix your coding errors, update your content than wait to see what happens (as you are writing more content).

[genidude]

Thank you all for good advice.
You bring up a good point about the in-bound links. Somebody could sabatoge their competition if they wanted to if Google penalized you just because you had a large influx of links coming in.
We were not dropped completely. We still rank well for many terms, we just went down a little in some, and more in others.
I'm not dismissing the other factors, I just tend to think due to the timing that it must be one of those factors I mentioned. I'm now more inclined to lean toward the paid directly links.
We are too busy to handle SEO in-house anymore.
Does anybody have any recommendations for a good SEO firm?

[G[dot]com]

Google´s cache of your homepage shows it was crawled february 14, and the "text only" version is not as bad as it could be infered by what other posters above say about your code. Google doesn´t even have a "DOCTYPE!" declaration and if you validate their search page it retrieves a lot of errors.

I think that if you have done well so far with that site, as is, that is not the problem and surely a lot of inbound links at once can cause you a flux, like if google had to "evaluate" what went on. How long since this has happened? Also, contextual words next to the anchor text -link- to your page at those forum pages matter, they give google some context... perhaps you have "disoriented" google with all that overload of contextual data to analyze and it takes some time to assess all the info (give it two weeks at least).

Also, you say "too much links"... how much is "too much"? 20, 100, 500? I don´t think you have to reach 10k links to be penalized, because only few people on the planet would be able to add 10k inboud links at once. I think that penalization or temporary ban can be achieved if it detects more than 50 links at once (something feasable for a normal SEO optimizer in a day). They try to rule for the majority of cases, not for exceptions, so if they would wait for youto add 10k links, there would surely penalize no-one, ti would be useless for daily maintainance of their result´s pages.

My two coins. Good luck

[genidude]

We added 40 links to various forums posted throughout the web over a two week time frame

[genidude]

This was completed by about two weeks ago.

[weslinda]

G.com: The code is bad, and bloated. A better design will bring better results.

[weslinda]

Originally Posted by genidude

We were not dropped completely. We still rank well for many terms, we just went down a little in some, and more in others.

This statement says it's not the links. This statement confirms it is much more likely to be the current / new update people are seeing within Google. If it was a links issue, you'd see a broader slap on your site.

Originally Posted by genidude

Does anybody have any recommendations for a good SEO firm?

This depends on your budget. We know what we're doing, but we're not cheap. Webnauts is very good. If not one of the best, but he's more expensive than I am. Getting back to the basics is a very good key to long term success.

[seo4china]

Definitely not a penalty due to link building. Just give it time and continue your SEO efforts...

[brucet]

The page (and site) has not been changed significantly for a long time

That in itself will cause your rankings to decline. Search engines prefer fresh content to ageing.

[simonm]

rapid link building.. I agree that it seems logical that Google 'should' ignore things that are apparently outside the control of website owner, however in the real world it has to regulate the output of its search list so that spammers and Google bombers don't manipulate the results.

On the grounds that we know the basics of the google algorithm, but not the twiddly bits that keep us guessing, I would suggest that a sudden boom in inbound links would have an effect.

[davidweb]

Originally Posted by genidude

We recently made a foolish mistake on our web site regarding links. We innocently put a bunch of links on our site from various forums from accross the web. These links link back to our web site.

These links we place on our web site were from forums where members who posted messages about our site and their positive experience with our web site and our service to them.

It was just done as a way of letting our customers know the quality of service we provide. I'm sure Google wouldn't have penalized us if we had done it over a longer time frame.

Unfortunately, our mistake was that we added too many links too fast. I believe google saw all these new links to us so quickly that it considered it "spammy".

I can see that most of the forum postings have a PR of 0, because they are deep pages, so i figure when the Googlebot visited our site and saw all of these brand new links coming back to us, it figured we had done something black hat.

Our rankings have gone down significantly in the week or two since this occured. We have since removed those links in hopes that our ranks will return to their previous position.

My question is, will our rankings eventually revert back to the old positions after time, or is this penalty more permanent in nature?

It could take 1-2 months. Since you have immediately removed the links, it is good for your website.

These links got perceived as link exchange program by Google, and it really discourages webmasters to indulge in similar techniques.

If you would have added rel="nofollow", then you shouldnt have faced this issue . It could be possible that google hasnt penalised, but transferring ranking power to those external website links

[weslinda]

Simon: 2 paid links isn't a "boom". Nor is the "40 links" that he added in total. Google is not penalizing him for the links. Look at his comments on the fact that his entire site hasn't lost rank, just some pages for some keywords and adjusted in position.

[weslinda]

Davidweb: 2 paid links do not set off triggers within Google! 2000 sure, 2, no.

[blogdawg1]

I weigh in on the side that the links are not hurting you at all. It's not like you were banned or penalized, you just lost some rankings. Happens to the best of us.

Update your content, fix up as much of you code as you can, and keep building links -- the right way.

[amabaie]

I am reading all these message and the one thing I conclude is that it does not make sense to remove the paid links. The two most likely reasons I see for the change in rankings are:

a) normal fluctuations, where certain aspects have nbeen devalued for some sites and revalued for others.

b) too many similar links in a short space of time, so you need to focus on getting other types of links to balance it out and make for a more natural linking pattern that should theoretically even out the rough edges.

Of course, this is all conjecture, but I would definitely err on the side of adding more links (of different varieties) rather than removing ones you already have.


And as the Incredible Help says, take everything you read here with a great big salt lick.