Could this have penalized our domain?
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So I've been wracking my brain about a problem. I had posted earlier about our degrading rank that we haven't been able to arrest. I thought we were doing everything right.
Many years ago we had a program that would allow other stores in our niche use our site as a storefront if they couldn't deal with setting up their own site. They would have their own homepage with their own domain but all links from that page would go to our site to avoid duplicate content issues (before I knew about canonical meta tags or before they existed, I don't remember).
I just realize that we had dozens of these domains pointing to our site without nofollow meta tags. Is it possible that this pattern looked like we were trying to game Google and have been penalized as some kind of link farm since Panda?
I've added nofollow meta tags to these domains. If we were being penalized for this, should this fix the problem?
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I nofollowed all of these pages a few days ago. The intention wasn't to create a link farm but I realize after giving it thought that it could be perceived as one.
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What you are describing sounds like a linkfarm, since you are creating many sites that link back to you. Google can detect linkfarms and I think this could have caused a penalty. Nofollowing these links should help. However, Blogger blogs often have a followed link to Blogger.com and I don't think Google would penalize Blogger.com for this. I think the fact that all the links on the sites point back to you might be the issue.
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Please can you post your site ?
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