Any ideas why I might be penalized by Google?

[Catfish]

My oldest website www.poker-coaching.net seems to have been penalized by Google. It used to have a steady 30-40 visitors a day for along time, then dropped to zero. Aside from building some links and adding some articles, I didn't change nothing.
I did ask Google for a site reconsideration, but since I had no idea of what I had done wrong, I did not give any specific reasons in the request. Actually, a few days after the reconsideration request, the site went back to normal for a few days, then dropped to zero again. I'd really appreciate any opinion as to why the site might have been penalized, and any advice what I could do to straighten this out.

[Prenut]

It's taking forever to load. This ridiculous load time and/or recent downtime is likely to be causing your problem.

[3jokers]

Hmm loads quick for me. But I noticed low pagerank and few backlinks.

[Michael Martinez]

The load time issue is, I think, a script rendering issue. I don't know how much value Google places on that, but your FreeRolls script might be part of the issue.

I couldn't really find any links that I (a relative outsider to Poker Affiliate Websites) would consider to be high-value links. You guys know which sites should be trusted. I did look at a sample of your backlinks as reported by Google and they seemed okay to me, but then we all know how little information Google shares.

Some of the things to consider that might trigger a penalty (for an affiliate site):

• Content is too "thin" (too promotional, too much promotion-to-information)
• Buying or selling links
• Excessive outbound linking to suspicious or penalized sites
• Insufficient outbound linking to trusted, high-value sites
• Using "bait-and-switch" technology (cloaking, abusive 301-redirects, etc.)
• Hiding text
• Low-value link profile (your backlinks fall out of the index)
• Excessive link method-based profile (too many blog comment links, too many forum profile links, too many reciprocal links, i.e., insufficient variety in backlinks)
• Advocating something that Google deems to be illegal or malicious

Based upon a cursory examination of your site, my gut suggests it's a link-related issue. If the site is penalized I don't think it is *fully* penalized and it might be you're just seeing a temporary downturn (which is usually a sign of low PageRank/weak linkage).

How long has this been going on? How have you been acquiring links?

[superiorword]

Did you use any social bookmarking tool or article submission/distribution tool or service?

[DonEgon]

Maybe it had something to do with your sitemap? I found alot of broken links inside the sitemap.xml and only old articles.

[Catfish]

I did build some links through social bookmarking, but not to the extent that it should trigger e penalty. The Freeroll script does load slowly at times, I was thinking about taking it down. I didn't have any down times recently either.
I am aware of the fact that I need more quality links, but I did get visitors before, and the site has 100+ pages with relevant information. Since the site has had a constant visitor count for years, I can't see why all of the sudden the content should cause this kind of problems, or the lack of backlinks.
From what I see, the slow loading may be a problem, or maybe I did create too many social bookmarks in too short a time.
If it is the bookmarks, then there's little I can do about that or is there?

[Sebastian]

If you used a mass bookmarking service and developed too many links to fast, you could have tripped a filter somewhere.

[Michael Martinez]

If it is the bookmarks, then there's little I can do about that or is there?

How many social bookmarks did you create?

Can you delete them (assuming you decide that is the thing to do)?

How do you know they are not nofollowed? If they are nofollowed, it's unlikely they are causing your grief.

[Catfish]

the social bookmarks I built are both nofollow and dofollow, and I built about 500 over a period of 3 months.
I have now checked my sitemap and found they all gave the pages as mypage.com/index.php/nameofurl.net, while the index.php doesnt show in the real URLs, so the links in the sitemap were all broken. I think that might have caused the problem, so I have now installed a new sitemap component, submitted it to to Google and asked for a site reconsideration again. Hope it will help.