11 000 links from 2 blogs + Many bad links = Penguin 2.0\. What is the real cause?

[antoine.brunel]

Hello,

A website has :

1/ 8000 inbound links from 1 blog and 3000 from another one. They are clean and good blogs, all links are NOT marked as no-follow.

2/ Many bad links from directories that have been unindexed or penalized by Google

On the 22nd of May, the website got hurt by Penguin 2.0. The link profile contains many directories and articles.

The priority we had so far was unindexing the bad links, however shall we no-follow the blog links as well?

Thanks!

[gazzerman1]

Why are there so many links from just 2 domains?

If they are sitewide, Google is not a fan of that unless they are nofollow, however why are some nofolow and others follow? Is that not a signal to Google in some way? Why would a site naturally have some nofollow and some dofollow links to your site?

[TomRayner]

I think you just need to ask the question - how "natural" is it to have 8000 or 3000 links from just 1 domain?  And how natural is it that it takes up a large proportion of your link profile?

The answer is likely to be not very natural at all.  And for that reason, you should remove/nofollow/disavow if you can.  Incidentally, if the amount of links has been inflated by tagging/category issues on that blog, then your website is potentially being linked to by masses of duplicate content, which is even more of a problem.

All 8000 links might be contextual and earned, but I'm almost certain Google would not see it that way and that's contributing to your algorithmic penalty.  I'd nofollow if you can or better yet have the links removed.

Hope this helps.

[AngelDigital]

Hello!

I'm assuming those blog links are sitewide links like in the header/footer/sidebar?

In which case the question is really, is it a natural link? It's not the fact that it's a sitewide link that's really the problem. You'd expect sitewide links in some situations, for example with group company websites that link back to the main group website and this is natural behaviour.  It's more where you get links that just have no reason to be there, Like, 'Blogroll:' and then 5 random unrelated sites linked by their anchor text.  If on the other hand you've earned a couple of links in a list of good related resources in the sidebar, these are unlikely to cause you any problems.

If they don't 'feel natural', I would definitely ask if they can be made no-follow or better still, ask if they could each just give you one nice in-content link

ED: apologies for repeating some of the above answers, I think we all posted at the same time!

[gfiorelli1]

Sitewide links are not the ideal, even if their are good.

I suppose the links in the good blogs are from a blogroll in sidebar, and that location for a link may sound suspect.

Said that, I would maintain them at first,  concentrate in cleaning the toxic links you have detected, do a reconsideration request (and eventually uploading a disavow).

Just in the case the penalization is not quit, then I will consider the idea of asking the blogs to move the link from a sitewide situation to an editorial one (maybe creating a page: "The site we like", which should not be just a list of links but also give an explication why the blogs like those sites.

That would be helpful also for the sites themselves, because they will get rid of any suspect of manipulative link building from their side.