Can a sitewide backlink with exact anchor text penalize my website?

[sbrault74]

A few years ago, I exchanged a link with another website. In the meantime, this other website grew quite fast and now they just added a forum.

The backlink from their website is sitewide and is using the anchor text "best web hosting". According to Google, this backlink now appears on 117,000 pages of the same domain.

Yesterday, I just got a warning from Google:

"We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines..."

Could that sitewide link be one of the causes?

Of course I know there are tons of bad links to my site but I'm wondering if I should get this one removed.

Thank you for your help and sorry for my english.

Stephane

[tripled511]

Hi Stephane,

I would suspect that those links are a problem. If they make up a majority of your link profile then it looks "unnatural" to Google. Usually, your highest frequency of Anchor Text should be your brand name or home page. Your best bet is to use Open Site Explorer and check your Anchor Text distribution. If this link appears in the footer or sidebar you are raising another red flag.

After doing some research your best bet would be to ask that webmaster if they can add the "no follow" attribute to a majority of the links. You might want to find strong pages on their site to ask for an in text link in order to keep some of the link juice. These links are generally editorially given and do not raise red flags.

Hope that helps!

[sbrault74]

Thank you for your response.

In the meantime, I chose to email the webmaster so that he can have the link removed.

I've got thousands of natural links to my website and near 1000 pages of unique, useful content so hopefully removing that link won't cause any major change since I wasn't ranking for that keyword anyway.