Blog Network: Slap? Need Opinion from Experts

[GeorgR.]

A site of mine got slapped hard this year and was penalized for exactly 6 months. This happened because i did really stupid stuff back then like hiring someone who did a crazy link blast (forum profiles).

Otherwise i do only very mild "supporting" link building like submitting to blog networks once a week.

So the site came back in October and i was glad that it was out from the penalty. (By the way its an established site some years old)

I had one unrelated site of mine in the network to have credit for submissions. Recently, they (Google) seemed to have gone on a binge again and de-indexed about 30% of the blogs in this relatively known blog network.

My (unrelated) site was one of them which got deindexed.

This is not really a problem, the problem is rather that the old site which just came back from penalty not even months ago AGAIN just got penalized hard.

I did not do any blasts or anything but instead barely touched the site. I just had the "usual" article in this and another network which, in terms of link amount/volume is rather insignificant. (Network 1 creates maybe 10 links/week and the other network creates like 20 a month...)

My question is whether the fact that i had one site being part of the blog network getting de-indexed has also effected my other site negatively, up to the point that it got a serious penalization - or whether the fact that i had an article or two in two blog networks linking to this site got it penalized? (Which i basically did already for years and never had a problem with this, to the contrary actually).

Or that the sudden de-valuation of a bunch of links in the network(s) due to Google radical de-indexing migth just have downranked my site that hard?

I am wondering whether other people experienced the same thing. I am just really ***** right now seeing that the site got slapped so hard again but somewhat at a loss why...

[Mike Anthony]

Kind of hard to tell without looking at the sites. One quick question before I give it my best shot. That old site that was penalized - did you ever clean up the links? if you lost a third of your links though its not really that strange if you fell.

[GeorgR.]

I cleaned out links a while ago, because i suspected this could have been reason for the first penalty. I only link out to three authority sites and all the comments are no-follow.

What do you recommend? Deleting all comments even if they are no-follow?

[theseoguys]

Did you submit a reconsideration request or did you just 'wait' for the site to come back on its own?

[GeorgR.]

I didn't submit one for this site as far as i remember (when i got that first penalty)..because with another site reconsider requests really didn't do anything.
I am still unsure about the comments..but i am almost positive that my other links are all clean/trustworthy.

[GeorgR.]

i will delete the unrelated ones tho..

[gregmac037]

Hi,

Are all of your keywords loose ranks? Below top 100?
What are their rankings when your keywords loose ranks? Top10?
Do you add content regularly?
Is your website on a competitive niche?
DOes your website have good content?

If most of your keywords are on top 10 rankings after they loose ranks, it seems your website is:
manually reviewed
hit by panda

Best Regards

[grexley]

What does your backlink profile look like for your site that was penalized? Are most of your backlinks from a blog network? What about most of your recent backlinks? Were you building or gaining natural links from other sources?

You may not be seeing a penalty, you may just have lost the value of most of your backlinks.

[GeorgR.]

The link quality is rather "meh" because i checked them today, it's stuff like article-directories and "wild blogs"....definitely need to work on this.

BUT...the slaps are happening way too "obvious" basically from one day to the other down to 10% of the traffic...literally from one day to the other. Since i already had this happening once i know 100% for certain this is a penalty and not a "natural" thing...

My guess is that there was some evaluation/review going on again (possibly even manual) and then instant downranking of the site POSSIBLY seeing that the links are of rather low quality.

[retsek]

If you didn't submit a reconsideration request ..how did you come to the conclusion it was a penalty?

[Mike Grant]

There's far too many reasons to even bother trying to give suggestions. There's so many footprints G can use to track you.