Penalty on two primary keywords

[MPO]

Hi Seomoz,

I have been strugling to get www.texaspoker.dk out of what seems to be a keyword specific penalty (we are on page 5 on "poker" and "online poker").

First I thought it was Penguin related, but I'm not so sure any longer. I have removed all the bad links to my site possible (it's not easy to get other people to remove links, I can tell you), and I have reported all the links that I would like google to "ignore" (reconsideration request) ... all in all I have requested for reconsideration 5 times, and - despite some small changes - I got the same answer every time.

We violate the quality guide lines and we should be looking for unnatural links pointing to our site.

If any one - by having a look at our site - have any idea what could be wrong, please don't hold back, we would love to hear your point of view.

Right now we are in the middle of making our partners take off their site wide links to us (the partners you'll find if you click the flags to the right in the top of the home page). On Texaspoker.dk we only link to the partners from the home page, but maybe we should consider to take of even these links? No one is really clicking on them anyway.

Another thing, which is only under consideration, is to ask our partners from Betxpert.com (with whom we have exchanged our news feed - you will find their feed if you schroll down the home page) to set the feed to "no follow" and do the same our selves. What do you think of this thought?

As far as I can see, there is nothing wrong with the on page optimization, but maybe some one can see what I don't see?

Again - what ever thoughts you guys may have - shoot ... i'm ready to take all bulets

Thanks in advance!

Nicolai, Texaspoker.dk

[Maximise]

I can certainly feel your pain as I have also recently trying to get links removed.

One thing I have noticed is that you have about 18000 links pointing to your site with no anchor text. I had a quick look at a few of these links and they look like this:

<a <span="">id</a><a <span="">="flags" class="dk" href="</a>http://www.texaspoker.dk" title="Texaspoker.dk" target="_blank">

Do you know what the purpose of these links are? As there is no anchor text the links probably aren't visible to users and they are also not nofollowed, these look very spammy and I would get them changed if possible.

[MPO]

Hi Maximise,

Thanks a lot for your reply and help. I will get the links removed right away. I'm planing to ask our international partners only to link from the home page - do you think that will do the job (if the links from the flags are the reason for the penalty)?

Thanks a lot - your help is deeply appreciated

Nicolai

[Maximise]

Hi Nocolai,

No problem. Yes, having the link from only the homepage should help. This often happens when a website uses the same template for the whole site which means the link becomes a sitewide link and looks unnatural to search engines. Double check that there is also some anchor text or an image because it didn't look like there was any when I checked. If they are adverts then the links should use nofollow.