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I know that Google states 'several' weeks but just wondering if anybody has any experience with a Reconsideration request and if they got any type of reply and what their general experience was. thanks

Hi I stupidly thought that it would be a good idea to set up a reciprocal links page on my website named 'links'.  I did this because my competitors were linking to these pages so I though it would be a good idea and I genuinely didn't know that you could be punished for this.  Within about 3 weeks my rank dropped about 3 pages. I have since removed the links and the page was cached last Friday but the site still appears to have a penalty.  I assumed when Google cached the page and saw the links were not there anymore that the penalty would be lifted. Anyone got any ideas? ps. The competitor websites had broken their links pages into various categories relating to the website i.e. related directories etc. so this might be why they weren't penalized.

Hi I've been rather silly and been linking out to other websites for reciprical links.  I added about 20 and just discovered some were bad neigbourhoods.  On Sunday my rankings tanked but the page was only cached the following day on the Monday.  Just wondering if there is any connection. I genuinely did not know that linking out could was bad and have removed all reciprical links as a precaution.

I have been using Open Site Explorer for the following website http://www.doorhandlesltd.co.uk/ I have been link building for serveral months now and added over 100 links including directories such as business.com yet when I run the Open Site Explorer report it says I only have 10 root domain links.......the ones that were there before I started my link building. Any ideas on why this might be? Or does Open Site Explorer take a certain amount of time to collect this data?  If so does anybody know how long this takes? Thanks

I'm doing some work on an ecommerce website which appears as www.domain.com/ I'm just curious about the relevance of the forward slash at the end when I'm linking to the website.  Should I link to www.domain.com or www.domain.com/ or does this even matter? Thanks