Numerous (20K+) inbound links from ONE site in short time period

[Smith-Digital]

I'm somewhat new to SEO, but from what I understand, slow link growth can provide better results than highly aggressive link building campaigns.

A site of mine was recently featured on a 90+ DA (55 PA) blog directory, and was featured for the entire state, therefore I received almost 20,000 inbound links from the site (from every company/listing in the state). The links have been mostly recorded (17,000) in Google webmaster tools (Yahoo Site Explorer claims around 23,000). However the site dropped 2 pages in rankings for numerous SEO related keywords since webmaster tools listed the links. Many of them are PA 50+, though a majority of the linking pages are PA 1. A few other inbound links were created from other root domains, roughly 8-10 or so in the past month.

The question is, would a large amount of links like this all of a sudden trigger some kind of "penalty" from search engines (Google, especially)? And, do the PA 1 pages take away from the quality of the 55 PA links?

[irvingw]

Tons of sitewide links all at once can hurt a site that has very few incoming links, they get discounted anyway so the best thing to do is to get a homepage link only since the homepage is usually the highest PR page on a site, and well crawled by Google. Also, being linked to from a penalized or bad neighborhood can hurt you so you should vet your incoming links and remove any offending ones.

Too many links at once I do not believe is a factor, because Google is not going to penalized a site just because it goes viral, it is more about the TYPES of links and diversification of those links that can trigger a penalty.

[EGOL]

This is a REALLY good answer.  I wish I could give more than one thumbs up.

[ShaMenz]

Hi Jonathon,

At this point you have done nothing untoward and obviously produced a site that was seen as valuable and shared in a purely natural way. If you were to start trying to influence people to remove your links, then you would actually be manipulating the link profile, which is what the search engines don't like!

Now that we know exactly how you came by the links, I would definitely follow the steps Ryan mentioned, starting with a reconsideration request.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[RyanKent]

The reasonable possibilities are as follows:

• the 20k inbound links triggered an algorithmic penalty

• the other inbound links you mentioned triggered a penalty

• there was another change related to your site which caused the ranking drop

• the information you are providing is incomplete or inaccurate

We are all proceeding under the assumption the information you are providing is accurate so the first three possibilities are the only options I can think of. As Sha suggested, you should file a reconsideration request to confirm you have not been manually penalized. If that is not the case, then a review of your site to determine the potential source of any algorithmic penalties would be in order.

[Smith-Digital]

Thank you for the response!

About the anchors, they are all identical as far as I can see "Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Articles". The link is to the category (instead of my root domain name).

The reason I ask is that, if I can have people "UN-favorite" the site, I could drop off the featured list if it will help my rankings return to normal. If that were to happen, though, will the inbound links "drop off" the lists?

Thanks for the reconsideration request link too, I didn't realize Google did that!

[Smith-Digital]

My domain name was registered in 2003. In the past, I had only gotten links from websites that I designed (started 2 years ago or so). I had roughly 20 root domains as of 1 month ago.

The listing directory is bloglines.com, which seems associated with merchant circle data (or is an affiliate). "They" picked the site as a favorite blog of Texas, and therefore the featured links. It is not paid.

I can't imagine it being fair that my rankings were negatively affected by it, though..

Any comment on the PA 1 vs PA 55 links? Is it the highest that counts since they're all from the same domain name?

[ShaMenz]

Hi Jonathon,

I would agree with James (oh and Ryan too!) that the sudden addition of that number of links may alter your link profile in such a way as to signal to search engines that there may be some kind of manipulative link building practice going on.

Something that is likely to make this appear even more like a manipulative practice would be if the Lion's share of the anchor text used to create the links to your site is identical, for an exact match keyword term etc.

One thing we should clarify is that while this may be having a negative effect upon your rankings, it is not really a "penalty" as such. Basically, the algorithm is seeing a sudden and unnatural looking change in your link profile and adjusting your ranking as a result. If Google has manually applied a penalty for any reason, they are now informing webmasters through notifications in Google Webmaster Tools. Manual penalties usually only happen if you are doing something really overt like buying or selling links. As Ryan mentioned, if the directory is part of a paid link system, it would be an issue. In that case I would expect to find a message in Webmaster Tools.

If it were me I would leave it be for a while and see what happens.

First, provided the directory is not a problem, with 20,000 targeted referral links out there, your potential for increased conversion ready traffic is greatly enhanced anyway.

Second, I would expect that with a little time and maybe some more gradual and diverse links added to your link profile (and no more major spikes), your rankings will tend to come back anyway. If they don't begin to improve (or continue to worsen) within a month, I would bring it to Google's attention by filing a Reconsideration Request. This link is the latest from the Webspam Team on the current process.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[RyanKent]

I agree with James. If you add too many links too fast to an established site, you can incur a penalty.

What is the name of the directory? One possibility is you have used a pay directory and incurred a penalty.

[JamesNorquay]

Hi,

If your website is very new and suddenly you add 20,000 pages of links it can have a impact on search engines, I have seen this on new websites in the past, hence why I do not try and gather a huge amount of links in a very short period of time.

But the thing is if you have a website which already has a huge amount of links 500,000 for example and you have 20k pages added then it will not really have a impact.

Kind Regards,

James.