sitewide links...aka google bowling

[Chris]

I'm not sure if it is this or not but.... I removed alot of the links that were pointing to my coupon site from my other sites. They were sitewide links and all that, 8000 of them. The coupon site has gotten back into some good positions in Google's serps now after a long break. At this point I can only assume the links were causing it to fall... seen as spammy I guess (one more vote in favor of hub-spoke linking).

[Shawn]

Define long break, if you don't mind.

[chromate]

Interesting you should mention this Chris. I think I may be suffering from a similar problem.

I was trying to work out why the (then) top ranking site for South Beach Diet was constantly ranking so well. I noticed that he was linking to his site from another site he owned on almost 1k pages. So I decided to try it out and linked from my carbohydrate counter site to my south beach diet site on about 1k pages. A couple of weeks later - BAM - my south beach diet site is now as good as gone from google.

I'm not sure if this is some kind of coincidence, because the competition I talked of is also no longer doing so well. So it could be related to this latest Jagger update. Also, I'm still linking from my carb counter site on all its pages to my carbohydrate counter site and that's still doing fine. However, these are highly related sub-page to sub-page links.

I'm also a little concerned about linking to my sites in forum sigs now for the same reason. I'm leaving my old sites in place, but I think I'm going to hold back linking to my newer sites from my sig for the time being.

[Chris]

Define long break, if you don't mind.
#1 in all of 2003. Lost rankings in early December of that year. Got back for 2 months (june/july) of 04. Then now.

At times the domains changed, but the links always pointed to whatever domain I was using.

[Chris]

actually you know what... I also recently fixed a trailing slash issue where Google had all pages down twice, once with the trailing slash, once without it. So... I'm not sure which change helped. Will have to wait and see.

[ozgression]

Similarly, would linking to a page on your own site from every page on that same site penalize it? eg. over optimization

Say, in the navigation of something...

[paul]

Since you never know what page a visitor will land on first, it seems only right for each page to have a link to home, a site map, a contact page, etc. It doesn't seem like that should create any penalties.

[moonshield]

^ indeed. Google probably does not want to encourage sites that are difficult to navigate in its results.

[peach]

actually you know what... I also recently fixed a trailing slash issue where Google had all pages down twice, once with the trailing slash, once without it. So... I'm not sure which change helped. Will have to wait and see.

The Jagger updates brought in some new spam filters, that might exaplain it.
I've heard more reports about google's spam filters becoming more sensitve to sitewide links.

[davesplace1]

The thing about Google's new spam filters is that they work too good, now I can't find what I'm looking for :(

[peach]

The thing about Google's new spam filters is that they work too good, now I can't find what I'm looking for :(
so you're looking for spam then?