Too many links... OOPS
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So I made a big mistake. I know it was dumb. I took a chance and got screwed. I've been researching one of my competitions back links and found that about 7000 of their 12000 links came from one site. Upon further investigation that site is a page rank 7 and the link looked bought. My competitions page rank is 6 which I thought was largely because of this one link. I e-mailed the linking sites webmaster and they bought the link pretty cheap. So I thought... Hey!? Why not!
About two weeks later, today, google webmaster tools finally found the link and my links went from 100 to 7100. Now that I really think about it, I know it was a stupid move. I just figured if they got away with it, I could.
I'm a white hat seo'er from now on. I've learned my lesson. Wake up today and find that all 400 keywords I am attempting to rank for, which 60% used to be in the top 3, are now not in the top 100. Luckily I am still indexed in Google though, I'm just not ranking for anything significant.
Now I e-mailed the linking sites webmaster and had him remove the links. He was pretty quick about putting them up, so I figure they'll be down today. Is it just a matter of Google realizing that they're gone until I'm back in the SERPS? Or am I screwed for good? This is a little scary, I depend on Google for my entire livelihood. Yeah, I know not something I should be gambling with then.
I only spent $125 on the links, but every month of traffic is worth about $3k to me. Ouch. If I lose a few months I'm at least looking at a $10k hit. Please give me some good news
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Scary stuff, Brian.
I know that sinking feeling. Just got bombed myself. Whether by Panda, because of user experience or a little too over optimized anchor text, I am not sure yet. Two weeks and my ranking have yet to come back.
Clean up the site, remove the bad links and cross your fingers for a speedy return is about all you can do.
Good luck with it.
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Google algo detects when you got a sudden urge of links to your site and it raises the "SPAM" flag, normally , like in your case, the algo sent the site to the SandBox.
Whats weird when this happens is that sometimes you drop for a few days than suddenly your site is back to the top and ranking higher than before.
Other times you just sit there in sandbox forever.
So I think you did the right move, the problem is that it can take quite sometime now to get your site back to where it was before.
Just as a side note, some people argue that if you keep building the links at the same rate for sometime you can come out of the sandbox with all the links, maybe this pattern makes the algo think that your site got viral or something (wich happens quite often I imagine) but to be honest i think its more a shot in the dark.
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Yeah I've spent the last couple of hours looking for info on this problem. Almost everyone is saying "too many links can't hurt". There's just no other explanation for what happened this morning. I was doing perfectly fine in the SERPS then right when Google recognizes all my new links, I fall back to nothing immediately.
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Where are all of those people who say... "Links can't hurt you."?
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Remove the bad links, make sure they are all gone, then file a reconsideration request explaining why you were penalized and what you have done about it. You should be fine after that, might take about a month or so. You can request reconsideration in your webmaster tools account by going here:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration
Good luck!
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