I added one of those free polls to a client’s site a few weeks back, and today I was supposed to remove it. Then I noticed something I somehow missed when I copied and pasted the original snippet of code to their site: there was a 1 pixel graphic linking to an online casino and there was alternate image text with gambling keywords.

For it’s target keywords, I noticed that the site had dropped from #4 to page one of Google, to #11. It consistently ranked well for several years, so I can only imagine that linking to a bad neighborhood got it hit with penalties. I removed the poll, but is the damage done?

Will the site bounce back from this?

My personal thought is that I would expect it to return. I’m confident that slipping to #11 is not a penalization, just a common drop in rankings.

Imagine following thing:

My site works some specific keywords (keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3) as usual and inside it i have pages for each one of them:

www.mysite.com/keyword1.php ;
www.mysite.com/keyword2.php ;
www.mysite.com/keyword3.php ;

So, i want to get rank for my index with those 3 keywords. I can use the keyword anchors mentioned in each one of them linking to my index cause all of those pages are related - i´m mentioning those keywords in all pages. But if i do that i´ll lose the natural flow of information in the contents of my intern pages.

What i mean is … the anchor keyword1 in the page www.mysite.com/keyword2.php ; can link to my index instead of www.mysite.com/keyword1.php ; but this approach brake the flow of information. I opted to strengthen my index in this scheme instead of my internal pages.

I would like know what do you think about this approach?If is good forget those anchors for the internal pages or give power to my index through blog articles, link building with external pages and keep those anchors to each specific page.