JLH Design Blog

I wante to patent the term MLSGB Penalty which is the My Link Scheme Got Busted Penalty..

The penalty presents itself as a sitewide deranking and no amount of on-page optimization or writing of reconsideration requests will fix it.

The problem is that your site which has built its reputation on crappy free directory listings, link exchanges, and automated text link purchases has been busted. Google has figured it out and systematically devalued the majority of your links. After all of those crap links are filtered what’s left is not much and the rankings you used to enjoy will not be found again until you can build your link profile back up to the level you were getting credit for, this time with real links. The MLSGB Penalty tends to be doled out in sectors by devaluing crap links in clusters.

Symptoms of this are:

• Reconsideration requests go unanswered no matter if you’ve removed other offending schemes.
• Sitewide PageRank drops
• Same number of pages indexed but long-tail results are way down
• Reduction in crawl rate
• Ability to get new pages indexed is reduced
• Not ranking for your own domain name
• Interlinked domains suffer the same consequences
• Seen in common sectors
• Decrease is sudden, if not over night
• Google’s site:, link:, and data in webmaster tools stays the same
• No warning or letter from Google

Basically what we have here is that the site was ranking falsely before based on an improper link profile, now that the link profile has been updated the symptoms above appear. You can’t be reconsidered because in order to restore the rankings they’d have to give you credit for the links, which isn’t going to happen. The one key anecdotal piece evidence here is a drop in ranking for the domain name, which generally returns eventually. Google has indicated that a drop in ranking for a domain name is a sign of penalty, however if it returns eventually I believe it points to another cause. Most worthless link directories link to sites with the domain name as the anchor text, which is quite unnatural in today’s linking. It may have been all the rave back in 1996 when people actually did build link lists for humans but not anymore, even news services use keyword anchor text to help add to the story. When Google has figured out that a majority of your links came from directories and link exchanges and removes the credit, the domain ranking suffers because a key indicator, anchor text, has been removed. Eventually relevancy will win over and the site will rank again for the domain. Just like a newly launched site will skyrocket to the top with a few good links because Google wants to keep its index fresh with the latest trends, the same goes for the reverse. When a site looses a large percentage of links all of a sudden it follows that it should also be reduced in rank. These behaviors happen naturally in the wild, a new site splashes onto the scene and goes viral in days, or an old site shuts its doors or gets involved in a scandal causing people to no longer link to it. Aggressive false link building mimics that natural quick link growth actual popular sites enjoy catapulting it to the top, but even more aggressive filtering by Google also mimics a drop in popularity.

How can you recover? Surely not through the same methods that got the site into this mess to begin with. More aggressive link building in crap directories and link exchanges on ‘links.html’ pages surely won’t help and may even aggravate the situation with another round of deranking. Reconsideration Requests will go unanswered as there is nothing to reconsider just a low linked site ranking where it should. The only answer is to build links naturally at a pace the site deserves and if the content is so poor that it won’t get links no matter who you show it to, it may be time to start over.

I have no insight whether or not this is manual or automated but I tend to think its manual as the quickness of the onset of the penalty suggests. An automated method would slowly remove such links as they are found, whereas a manual review of a sites link profile would tend to be quick and a one-time event. I think this penalty may have other aberrations such as “going supplemental”, “the minus (insert number of the day here) penalty”, or even some of the recent uproar over paid links.

I don’t want to give the impression that I believe the bad links to the site are actually harming anything, just that they used to count for something and no longer do. So before you go out and sign up your competitor for a million bestlittlewebsitedirectoryintheworld.com links remember that they may enjoy that unnatural bump for a while, and with the extra traffic actually get a few real links.