[AdamWB]

rsdunton, on 21 February 2012 - 13:29, said:

Same question as khidma, has anyone managed to fix the problem in the past?

Thinking of rebranding and just 301ing the domain

Careful with 301'ing, as it can pass on the penalty (not initially).

As posted before, I do a quick bolt on silo around the penalized portion and it usually fixes the problem within a few weeks - sometimes much faster - and seems to have a higher success rate.

This only works on sites that had certain pages penalized, and not the whole site - for those of you that this has happened to, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. If your entire site got hit, this method does not work - at least not in my experience.

[Fishingman1]

AdamWB, on 21 February 2012 - 14:02, said:

Careful with 301'ing, as it can pass on the penalty (not initially).

As posted before, I do a quick bolt on silo around the penalized portion and it usually fixes the problem within a few weeks - sometimes much faster - and seems to have a higher success rate.

This only works on sites that had certain pages penalized, and not the whole site - for those of you that this has happened to, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. If your entire site got hit, this method does not work - at least not in my experience.

Adamwb could you please point me to the post where an explanation of what you mean is.
cheers

[khidma]

Can you please post the URL or share the steps to go around the penalty for certain pages

AdamWB, on 21 February 2012 - 14:02, said:

Careful with 301'ing, as it can pass on the penalty (not initially).

As posted before, I do a quick bolt on silo around the penalized portion and it usually fixes the problem within a few weeks - sometimes much faster - and seems to have a higher success rate.

This only works on sites that had certain pages penalized, and not the whole site - for those of you that this has happened to, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. If your entire site got hit, this method does not work - at least not in my experience.

[rsdunton]

hmm, so it's looking like it's a case of just waiting to see if anything happens basically?

[Ivan Mosquera]

I have a pretty diverse link profile so its strange I'd take such a hit because of any one network getting deindexed but I am noticing old BMR posts no longer being indexed and I recently joined ThePrivateNetwork.net for homepage backlinks and have no way of knowing if that networks also received a hit.

[KaneTwo]

I'm just a small fry in this game and still on a learning curb, however I have noticed one pattern.

All of my sites with analytics installed took a hit on PR the ones without remain untouched. Also when I search for two of my blogs in google (which lost all their PR) they now have /?z after the url which seems to limit the content loaded.

[irishfury]

KaneTwo, on 22 February 2012 - 10:15, said:

I'm just a small fry in this game and still on a learning curb, however I have noticed one pattern.

All of my sites with analytics installed took a hit on PR the ones without remain untouched. Also when I search for two of my blogs in google (which lost all their PR) they now have /?z after the url which seems to limit the content loaded.

I had a few sites get hit they all have webmastertools/anayltics the sites that didn't get touched did not.

Edited by irishfury, 22 February 2012 - 11:18.

[KaneTwo]

irishfury, on 22 February 2012 - 11:18, said:

I had a few sites get hit they all have webmastertools/anayltics the sites that didn't get touched did not.

I will be removing analytics etc. ASAP I'm not sure if I even trust gmail accounts!

The silly thing is the two bogs that lost all there PR were filled with genuine content and not used for SEO purposes, not even monetized - bad move G

[raven]

im at a loss so far...

only thing i have noticed is a HPBL subscription that i had cancelled way earlier in 2011 still has my links up

[charto911]

Wow looks like I missed quite a lot since my initial post. IE is a smart dude so I dont see the reason for bashing him.

Now back on topic:

HPBL are a mishaven because of the huge footprint and if thats your linking strategy than shame on you for not having enough brains to come out with something more brilliant. In the future you could push all of those HPBL to a 2nd tier site and use that as your one very strong linking site for all of your business sites. Also if your network gets debunked you can always take down those links tiering to your sites.

As for the rest of the hits I have seen its not just HPBL that are the sole reason. This algo update is the toughest since mr. panda but seems to affected high quality sites that had low quality links with spun content.

[ryanjm]

Pat Jackson, on 19 February 2012 - 16:26, said:

It's not really a site being penalised, though.

It's just a result of you losing the links that were giving you the rankings in the first place.

I mean, let's say you found a bunch of high PR DoFollow pages where you could get links from, you built links there and suddenly your rankings went up very quickly.

Then, one day whoever was in charge of those pages took all of your links down.

Your rankings would likely suffer as a result but you wouldn't then suggest it was a Google penalty.

This. I haven't noticed any ranking changes across 50+ of my sites. All 3 of my HPBL networks (that I no longer sell) remain indexed though, so that's probably why.

Edited by ryanjm, 23 February 2012 - 23:12.

[ballin]

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed how much slower Google has been lately to move rankings? Some of my sites which didn't get penalized won't budge.

[Milk and Honey]

I lost rankings for one of my sites where I held the #1 spot for a major keyword in the market for almost a year. In fact, I achieved that #1 ranking immediately after the panda update at the end of February 2011. The site has since dropped from that #1 spot to #12, around the end of February 2012. Link diversity and velocity has remained constant in that time period, along with anchor text variation. I have narrowed the problem down to 2 HPBL networks and their deindexing problems. I believe the reason I did not drop a great deal is because the HPBL were such a diminutive portion of the sites overall link profile. This drop also leaves me to believe what Pat Jackson has said. The sites were deindexed, I lost some high PR links and my rankings reflected that loss.

Since the drop, I was able to push it up one spot to #11 with some edu/gov links (profile, wiki, and blog posts) and also using Pat Jackson's article syndication service. That was over the last 30 days.

Over the next 30 days, the real off page SEO shit storm begins. The site has age and PR including several inner pages. This will be the test and I will share it here if anyone is interested.

Here's what's coming for this site in the next 30 days:

Google +1's
Facebook Likes
Press Release
More Pat Jackson
Video Distribution
Linkpushing.net
Social network links
Social Bookmarks
RSS Feed syndication
Web 2.0 Profiles
Forum Profiles
Article Marketing (Both auto approve, non auto approve, and premium)
Private blog network submissions

All links are sent through my Unique Link Indexer set up.

These links are spread over several URL's across the site. Pat's service is awesome because not only are the links decent quality, but he also allows unlimited (within reason) keywords per URL which allows for good anchor text variation.

If anyone is interested, I'll try to remember and come back in a few weeks and let you know how I'm getting along.

[pixelgrinder]

Milk and Honey, on 24 February 2012 - 18:32, said:

I lost rankings for one of my sites where I held the #1 spot for a major keyword in the market for almost a year. In fact, I achieved that #1 ranking immediately after the panda update at the end of February 2011. The site has since dropped from that #1 spot to #12, around the end of February 2012. Link diversity and velocity has remained constant in that time period, along with anchor text variation. I have narrowed the problem down to 2 HPBL networks and their deindexing problems. I believe the reason I did not drop a great deal is because the HPBL were such a diminutive portion of the sites overall link profile. This drop also leaves me to believe what Pat Jackson has said. The sites were deindexed, I lost some high PR links and my rankings reflected that loss.

Since the drop, I was able to push it up one spot to #11 with some edu/gov links (profile, wiki, and blog posts) and also using Pat Jackson's article syndication service. That was over the last 30 days.

Over the next 30 days, the real off page SEO shit storm begins. The site has age and PR including several inner pages. This will be the test and I will share it here if anyone is interested.

Here's what's coming for this site in the next 30 days:

Google +1's
Facebook Likes
Press Release
More Pat Jackson
Video Distribution
Linkpushing.net
Social network links
Social Bookmarks
RSS Feed syndication
Web 2.0 Profiles
Forum Profiles
Article Marketing (Both auto approve, non auto approve, and premium)
Private blog network submissions

All links are sent through my Unique Link Indexer set up.

These links are spread over several URL's across the site. Pat's service is awesome because not only are the links decent quality, but he also allows unlimited (within reason) keywords per URL which allows for good anchor text variation.

If anyone is interested, I'll try to remember and come back in a few weeks and let you know how I'm getting along.

I think there isn't one penalty for HPBL going on here, I think there may be more as I am experiencing a fate similar to the above post. My sites had a large array of links and I didn't solely rely on HPBL. When the networks were nuked early January, my 10+ #1 rankings for various competitive keywords dropped - but still remained on the first page. Im not sitting around #6-10 for a few keywords and #10-20 for the rest.

After I was hit I began rebuilding with various new links (pretty serious link velocity) and haven't move more than 1-2 spots on a few keywords. After hearing other people state they are unable to move positions this makes it relatively conclusive (to me) there is a 'freeze' type penalty.

If your site was largely dependant on HPBL and you experienced a -50/-100 penality it could be a combination of low quality content and/or HPBL-reliant link profiles. If you achieved your primary SERP movement with HPBL this would make sense.

[RealEcon]

Its not that there is a freeze penalty, its that all the serps are a bit frozen/sticky right now. I have super easy local words that have not been on a HPBL net and they wont move up or down no matter what I throw at them. Normally, I can at least get my domains sandboxed.

[Fixer]

IMO there seems to be some consistent problems here.  I am still not convinced that there is a penalty or not but for me too many people seem to have blindly signed up to networks and not done any due diligence?? So for some people (not all) they only have themselves to blame.

I have seen some networks that are poorly set up, so just a massive block of text with links imbedded or just lots of posts with a single link for each subscriber.  Really you should be checking for things that I believe (with experience) that will stop sites from being deindexed.

Here are a few rules you should try to stick to when signing up to a network (IMO)-
1. Make sure you get a report (you need to be able to do your due diligence ASAP to protect your sites)
2. Make sure the sites are media rich (images & videos)
3. Make sure OBL's are low (not 80 or 100 like a lot of networks - below 60 is a lot safer)
4. Make sure anchor text variation is allowed
5. Don't go too big (networks with large numbers of sites will leave a bigger footprint, especially if they limit keywords/URLs too low)
6. Make sure the site has some authority links
7. Check to see that some posts have no links (having every post with 1 link is a little obvious)
8. Check the work count on posts (for example if a network puts your link in a 250ish word post then again a load of posts with similar word count is another big footprint)

I hope this helps all those who are still looking into networks as THEY STILL WORK

I have some networks that are still doing fine, the only problems people have had is when they are members on other networks that are poorly put together, most members still have great rankings so don't write them!!

[Mike C]

pixelgrinder, on 24 February 2012 - 22:11, said:

I think there isn't one penalty for HPBL going on here, I think there may be more as I am experiencing a fate similar to the above post. My sites had a large array of links and I didn't solely rely on HPBL. When the networks were nuked early January, my 10+ #1 rankings for various competitive keywords dropped - but still remained on the first page. Im not sitting around #6-10 for a few keywords and #10-20 for the rest.

same for me, dropped 4 or 5 places across several sites. nothing is moving up or down since this happened (feb 4th). I was not a part of any HPBL networks but did lose links from deindexed blogpost networks (I figured these could be made up for with the ALN/FBL).  I have tried

varied anchor txt substantially through lots of ALN/FBL posts
Tweaking keyword density to varying test levels on different sites
changing intenal linking patterns
used social bookmarking sevice for more link diversification
adding several new 500 word plus articles with pics/videos/authority outbound linking etc

None of these have made any difference

I have now ordered high pr posts which will stick on the homepage longer than ALN type posts.

Has anyone considered that google may have introduced a filter for blogposts which fall off the first page within hours as they do with ALN/FBL?

Edited by Dennis Wilson, 25 February 2012 - 04:10.

[abby013]

i still believe that there are no hpbl penalty here...

its just coincidence...

if there is a hpbl penalty, it would be easier to kill a competitor...

you loss ranks because you loss backlinks... thats all...

just build more backlinks with varied anchor text(5-10 anchor txt/url)

[Fixer]

abby013, on 25 February 2012 - 09:41, said:

i still believe that there are no hpbl penalty here...

its just coincidence...

if there is a hpbl penalty, it would be easier to kill a competitor...

you loss ranks because you loss backlinks... thats all...

just build more backlinks with varied anchor text(5-10 anchor txt/url)

I agree that I am not sure about this penalty, but I have not seen that many sites hit yet?

[abby013]

Fixer, on 25 February 2012 - 10:35, said:

I agree that I am not sure about this penalty, but I have not seen that many sites hit yet?

if you have joined hpbl, there would be a huge increase on your ranks of course...
if that hpbl is deindexed, there should be a drop also on your rankings (slowly and not instant)...

while slowly drop of your rankings occur, you build links and you notice your rankings still drops or no movements on your rankings which is normal...
to get your ranks back, you need to subscribe another better hpbl (in terms of page rank) to get your ranks back...

that would take 2-6weeks before you could get your ranks back...

just make sure you have varied anchor text...