Google Penalized Me!

[Anonymous User]

Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.anonsconverse.tk/,
We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team

I know that I have been penalized because if I type the name of my site, "anons converse", or "anons converse message board", or something like that, it's not coming up as the first or second result as it always used to! Last time I checked, it was coming up on the bottom of the sixth page.

Apparently it's saying that I have unnatural links. Now, I will go bullet by bullet and tell you what it is that I was doing:

- I submitted my link to a few directories
- I did a link exchange with The Admin Zone
- I kept answering questions on Yahoo! Answers and signing off with a link to my site or kept asking questions and linking to my website with the intent to promote it (this is what I think got me screwed because I probably got like 50 violations from Yahoo! for doing this and thank god they still haven't suspended me yet)
- I submitted a bunch of links to my website to Google - like one for my homepage, and then one for each of my forums
- For Promotion and Forum Hosting sites where it is a common practice to have a banner of your site that links to it in your signature, I did exactly that
- I changed my avatar on many places to that "AC" favicon
- I did html meta tags for a description as well as a list of keywords
- On some forums and places, I have set my "homepage" as my site

So is Yahoo! Answers what killed me, or is there something else as well? How do I resolve these issues?

 

[Venom]

On yahoo answers, did you link your site at the end of your reply or In the source box?.

 

[Anonymous User]

Pretty much.<br /><br />-- May 26th, 2013, 4:19 pm --<br /><br />I actually made another account on Yahoo! Answers, and went through all of the questions where my content containing the link had not been deleted, and reported abuse on all of them with the reason, "Non-Commercial Promotion of Personal Site" (which is one of their violations that I kept getting dinged for). However, the problem is that many of my answers were actually chosen as the best and survived the community moderation and I don't think they delete Best Answers there.

Is there another way I can get my Yahoo! Answers links removed?

 

[Venom]

Making another account and reporting your replies is just going to make it worse.

 

[D]

.tk domains aren't the best for a start. lol.

 

[Anonymous User]

I actually wasn't have much of an issue with the .tk domain name as far as SEO goes. I was ranking quite good actually, at least for a beginning site.

And Dennis, why do you say that? Yahoo! Answers, I think, allows people to have multiple account. In fact, so many people do and they don't seem to ban them.

 

[Venom]

I wasnt talking about multiple accounts here, Im talking about Reporting your messages possibly branding yourself as a spammer.

 

[Anonymous User]

Well, how else could I get rid of them?

And unfortunately, I already did that?

 

[Venom]

Maybe you could of logged into the account you posted with, and contact yahoo to get the links removed, explaining why?...

 

[Anonymous User]

Good idea. I will try that.

 

[Zaborg]

WOW, Google cares about .tk domains? Since when? :O

 

[xpl0iter]

Is there another way I can get my Yahoo! Answers links removed?

I think on Google webmaster tools you can demote the links pointing to your websites, so that if any of competitors tried to make your website penalized, you can use this tool.

BTW I really don't think its the yahoo answers. Check all your links from using opensiteexplorer and see if there any links from link farms or spam directories. Anyway if you tried to give a link on almost all the yahoo answers, then this might happen.

 

[Beverly]

Is it possible someone else is spamming your site with backlinks, maybe in an attempt to hurt your search engine rankings? Have you analyzed all backlinks and do any appear suspicious (such as they were not made by you)?

 

[MrSackfist]

Woah dude, one thing you shouldn't do is make multiple accounts, that is definitely going to hurt you

 

[Beverly]

Woah dude, one thing you shouldn't do is make multiple accounts, that is definitely going to hurt you

Another possibility is the reciprocal link exchange done with The Admin Zone. Google is not a huge fan of reciprocal links. Though it's just the one backlink. And, most times they are talking about excessive backlinks. So most likely the Yahoo Answers backlinks are problematic.

One thing you can do from now on is deep link to pages, rather than linking only to your home page. Most content on a blog or site is in a post, rather than on the home page. That will look less suspicious.