On site links triggering anchor text algorithmic penatly?

[SamCUK]

I'm trying to figure out why a drop in ranking occurred and think it may be related to an increase in on site links. I've attached images of the SEO moz report showing a jump in links from a few hundred to around 15,000 within the space of a week. I think this may be due to some on site work I did when I created categories (I use wordpress) for a large number of cities and towns in the UK. I soon realised I'd run into duplicate content issues and removed all these categories within a few days. As I added categories I also ran into 'too many on page links' warnings as each category I added created a new link and I ended up with hundreds on each page.

If you look at the analytics reports I suffered a huge drop in rankings on the 10th March and think this could be due to an on site anchor text problem that was caused by adding the categories and in turn creating many on site links. SEO moz found these links on the 11th and 25th Feb but my guess is that Google found them around at the same time but if these links are the problem then why didn't my rankings drop until the 10th March? Surely they would have dropped sooner? Would this cause a drop in rankings?

I've recieved an email from google saying that no manual penalty was applied to the site after I submitted a reconsideration request. Therefore it must be some kind of algorithmic penalty. Could this be the problem and if not what else should I look at. My baclink profile appears to be okay and I've been careful to vary my anchor text with inbound link building.

I'm at a loss as to what to do next. Any help will be much appreciated!

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[mememax]

It's a tricky situation, it seems like you were making many changes to your site, it's always risky to put links with keyword rich anchors, and when they're too many and built in a short time period that's definitely dangerous.

First of all get rid of everything you made in a "dangerous way" like your many internal links, normally google has itsrict  parameters to check out a page and when you're above a certain threshold you get hit. However I think that to recover the threshold is even lower, it seems like, google is more strict with you since you've tried to game their algo.

Now these are just my ideas and nothing confirmed but I think that you should try to clean up all the new links first, then have a look at your pages, that way to create a lot of pages in such short time, seems that they're programmed pages without any valuable content so they may be toxic for your recovery. Try to make a step back, and restart creating them on a slower pace and maybe hope google to reconsider your position. However if you don't have any manual penalty you'll have to wait until you get recovered. Reconsideration requests won't help you at all.

[SamCUK]

Thanks for your reply. The urls I removed are 404'ing so should I remove these urls in webmaster tools or let them drop out of the index naturally? They keep popping up in webmaser tools as crawl errors.

[KaneJamison]

OK, so assuming that the large jump in links is coming from internal links, here are a few ways that Wordpress might create that many pages:

• Creating an extreme number of categories (more than 20-30) while using permalinks that contain /%category%/ and applying posts to multiple categories.
• Using a theme that contains parameterized URLs such as ?reply-to-comment at the end of every comment reply button.
• Using a strange permalink setting that causes issues.

If all of those pages are really new internal URLs then I suppose it could have confused Google and affected your rankings but since I have not dealt with such an extreme amount of duplicate content added so quickly I couldn't say for sure.

There are also plenty of ways that you could have triggered that many external links. Any sidebar or footer link on a large site could easily add thousands of links. I highly doubt this type of link would have caused a ranking drop on its own - it's no different than someone adding you to their blogroll.

This is a difficult question to answer properly without looking at the site or the exact links, because all I can do is list of lots of hypothetical causes. If you'd like to include the domain or PM it to me I'm happy to look at the website itself.

[SamCUK]

Thanks for your reply. creating an extreme number of categories is what I did. I've deleted them now but but still on my seomoz link analysis it says over 14,000 links? I have no idea why? The site is http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com ( there is some adult content there) . Any ideas appreciated!

[KaneJamison]

I'll need to wait until tomorrow to check on this in OSE when they revert to the newer index once again. All of my link exports are currently showing link count prior to the increase. Should be able to update you tomorrow after I get a chance to look.

Ok, to update my response here, OSE is showing 14,000+ links as a result of your on-site changes. You can see that as a list of 745 top pages: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/pages.html?page=16&site=www.top-10-dating-reviews.com&sort=page_authority. Looks like those pages have at least 70 links each, which easily exceeds 14,000 possible links being found.

Open Site Explorer is updated roughly 1-2 times per month, and shows data that is roughly 20-50 days old depending on when you look at it and when the index was crawled. That's the explanation for why you're still seeing this in the search results. If it doesn't go away within the next 1-2 OSE updates then I'd look into it further.

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Regarding the original question about whether internal links can hurt the domain, a Matt Cutts video was released yesterday partially addressing this:

Will multiple internal links with the same anchor text hurt a site's ranking?: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ybpXU0ckKQ

That doesn't mean all of those pages of duplicate content may not have hurt rankings, but the links themselves were not the issue.

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I'm still confused by the Analytics drop but that could be due to a number of things. I'd say the answer lies in digging through Analytics and finding out what exactly dropped that day.

[SamCUK]

Ok thanks.

Sam.