Link Platform Diversity? Did you get slapped rankings?

[foreignhaus]

I have been working on a few clients websites and have recently had rankings plummet. Most of the links i get are coming from wordpress platform(blog posts), in the past it worked very well, has anyone else had a problem with just using wordpress platform i.e most of the links are coming from blogs......and had rankings drop?

[RyanKent]

Thank you for the clarification David.

We know Google has the ability to consider code in it's algorithms. If you create a website, then use that same exact code and template to build other sites and modify the content a bit, Google can recognize the links are generated from the same code and devalue them. Google desires links to be independent and using the same code among multiple sites is a signal sites could be related.

I have never heard of it applying to a general platform such as WordPress. In fact, my guess is most of the links to WordPress.com are from WordPress sites. The same would be true of any CMS software creator, forum creators, template creators, etc.

I could only speculate and would enjoy to see or hear about any testing that may have been performed on this topic.

[foreignhaus]

Thanks for the response but I see that I might confuse people by saying "Wordpress Platform"(what i meant was software platforms i.e drupal, wordpress,phpnuke) I'm was referring to  blogs powered by wordpress...not wordpress.com.. So Lets say you have a network of blogs powered by wordpress script. And your getting your links from blog posts from the network of blogs. Does that make sense?

[RyanKent]

A diversified link portfolio is a key component of a backlink profile. I would be highly concerned about depending on a common source such as wordpress.com for links. It is hard to offer any quantifiable numbers but I would consider any link profile which received 10%+ of it's links from a single source to be unhealthy.