Too many backlinks to a single page (homepage)... penalized?

[DSGChina]

So... is it a myth -- can you get penalized for too many backlinks to a single page?

I have a large site, about 675K indexed pages. While we were doing some SEO-related tweaks to some inner pages, we continued link building, putting emphasis on 5 keywords for just the homepage. We probably posted 30K links per month for 3 months. Not all of these stuck, obviously.

Suddenly, on Aug 19, we dropped like a rock from first page of Google to 200+ on all keywords, then out of the index on 3 of the 5 keywords.

Apparently, a forum post had gone viral and in Webmaster tools we had 50K+ links just to the homepage and about 10K backlinks to inner pages.

We've stopped building links to the homepage obviously.

What happened? I've checked everywhere for duplicate content, other issues, but nothing so far. I'm hoping that link building to the inner pages will help.

Warriors -- I need your sound counsel. Should we:
1. Build links to inner pages only
2. Build links to both inner and homepage
3. Other suggestions?

Thanks in advance. Would love to hear from others that have run into and solved this problem.

[mosthost]

This is no myth. Too many exact match anchor text links to one page and you disappear for that term.

[prcys]

Originally Posted by DSGChina

So... is it a myth -- can you get penalized for too many backlinks to a single page?


Warriors -- I need your sound counsel. Should we:
1. Build links to inner pages only
2. Build links to both inner and homepage
3. Other suggestions?

Thanks in advance. Would love to hear from others that have run into and solved this problem.

If those backlinks are from the low pr site or with not the best content then it may penalised your site. But reverse. If those links are from the high pr and authority sires and with the best content then it can not penalise but it be helpful for the sire results.
And if you think that you have the best and unique information on your site page whether is home page or the inner page then the link to that page be more helpful. So it depends on you that which of your site pages have the best information and for which pages you want to build the backlinks.

[DSGChina]

Further info:

The linkbuilding was pretty varied, I would say. Some low PRs for forums and articles, but sprinkled with PR3+ links throughout and in volume.

No other pages on the site have been penalized. In fact, we are doing better than in previous months.

What to do?

Warriors -- I need your sound counsel. Should we:
1. Build links to inner pages only
2. Build links to both inner and homepage
3. Other suggestions?

Thanks for your comments above -- helpful.

[kissofdeath]

I keep reading different opinions on this here in these forums, some people like the posts above are saying it can affect a site, others on othe rposts say that it does not work that way because all you'd need to do is sabotage your competition by spamming exact keyword backlinks,

it'd be nice to have some clarification on this......

[charlescl]

One of my new website got 1600+ back links after three weeks, I did not build so many links, and most of the domain can be opened, I don't know what is wrong with Google master tool, but now it is fixed, only 20+ back links.

[DSGChina]

OK... well, I guess there is no answer.

Anybody have a similar case / experience?

[linkbuildr]

I see it from time to time....over anchor text filter tripped.

[DeskCoder]

Building 5 different anchor text links to one page on your site is not the problem. Building 90K links in 3 months out of the blue probably is your problem.

I have a site that has about 20x more links to an inner page than any other page on the site ... and that page ranks top 20 for 3 keywords.

What about content ... is your home page content good? Maybe all those links triggered a manual review of the site.

[outwest]

30k backlinks a month? dont you think that looks odd?

[DSGChina]

Originally Posted by linkbuildr

I see it from time to time....over anchor text filter tripped.

Hmmm... not exactly sure what this means. Too many links built with the same anchor text?

Originally Posted by DeskCoder

Building 5 different anchor text links to one page on your site is not the problem. Building 90K links in 3 months out of the blue probably is your problem.

I have a site that has about 20x more links to an inner page than any other page on the site ... and that page ranks top 20 for 3 keywords.

What about content ... is your home page content good? Maybe all those links triggered a manual review of the site.

This isn't out of the blue. This is a 2yr old domain, PR5. We've been building links at that volume for several months. You would think that if there was a penalty, it would have happened much sooner. Plus, none of the other pages were penalized and the reconsideration request came back with "there is no penalty".

Content is unique and good.

[DSGChina]

Originally Posted by outwest

30k backlinks a month? dont you think that looks odd?

For a blog with 15 pages, yes.

For a site with 675K pages, probably not so much.

[DeskCoder]

Originally Posted by DSGChina

For a blog with 15 pages, yes.

For a site with 675K pages, probably not so much.

I would think the less pages you have, the more 30K links to one page would look legit. Since you have 675K pages, and 90% of links go to 1 page, that looks bad.

[DSGChina]

Point taken, and the point of the thread.

I'm thinking about setting up something like this:
xyzdomain.com/keyword1
xyzdomain.com/keyword2
xyzdomain.com/keyword3

Then building links to these pages. Content would be unique and changing periodically.

Thoughts?