10,000 links in 2 minutes

[Nextman]

Hey guys. A belated happy new year to everyone who reads this!

I had a strange experience yesterday with linking from a clients website footer.

Basically, the client currently has a serious duplicate content problem caused by a multiple language plug in. It has made Google believe that there are 10 different versions of the clients website online (one for each language). It is a real estate website and there are quite a few pages anyway, but with the error, I would suggest the page count is now around 10,000.

We are waiting for the developer who installed the plug in to repair the problem and without thinking it through really, yesterday, we made a text link to our home page in their footer.

Overnight, our rankings for the keyword we used for the text link have dropped from pos. 2 page 1 down to halfway down page 2.

Is this basically a sign that it is not good have this footer link from their site? I guess it is kind of like 10,000 weighted links being added in one day right?

For now we have removed the link, but any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Mark

[RobertFisher]

That is interesting. My gut says it likely did not impact you with a footer link to your page that quickly. Could have, but I am just not that convinced. Along with that, I will tell you that while early on we would link from client's footer to our site, we just don't do it anymore. One, footer links are of little value (and another reason I don't think that was the cause of the drop) and it is obvious if you host sites for clients that they are all on same server/C block.

I would go ahead with what you have done in removing the text link and see what happens over the next few days. Even if it pops right back up, it won't mean that was the cause. I have a site that was page one number 3 for a given quality keyword term that a month ago, dropped to page 5 number 9. Today (a month later) we are back at page one number 3. I cannot tell you why. (Google was SE).

Hope this helps

[Nextman]

You know actually Robert. We also changed the hosting of our website two days ago. Last time we did this, it made no difference at all and this time, it has made no difference to any other keyword phrases apart from the one that was the footer text link.

Do you find that swapping hosting sometimes causes drops? The new server should be faster.....

[Autobytel]

Have the client use the cannonical tag so that the pages are not duplicated for every language! That would fix their problems as well as yours

[RobertFisher]

A hosting change would not cause the drop. Especially given that is only one page. If there were a problem with hosting change, it would likely affect most or all.

If the plug in that was used is the problem, you won't need to change canonical.

[Nextman]

Yeah this is really strange. We have now dropped out of site for all of our main keywords. Weirder still, is that for some of the keywords the contact page on our site is ranking above the target landing page.

The thing I have noticed about the new hosting is that we no longer show for 'pages from the UK' and also the site speed on analytics seems quite a bit slower.

Do you think this could have all been caused by adding that one link?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Our website is www.mysocialagency.com