Penalization Question

[pcpro]

I have what I believe is a penalization from Google...one of my sites had several pages indexed about 4 weeks ago but no PR. This week I noticed that only the homepage is in Google's index.

I gave my site a very thorough going over..I believe that I was penalized b/c of linking to a link farm, but there is no way to be sure.

How can I find out for sure if this is what it is? I can't find any other problems and everything on the site now is on the level. I've since deleted all links to/from the link farm.

Appreciate the help!

[David Wallace]

Remove the links to the link farm and see if what you think is a penalty is lifted.

[pcpro]

thanks david..I've removed the link farm already so we'll see what happens. How long should it take to see the effects if in fact, it was a penalty?

Also, how does one know that their website was hit with a penalty vs. just not enough SEO?

[David Wallace]

Hard to say... if it was an algorithm filter then it could be a few days to a month. As for 2nd question, people usually know they have been penalized because they see some kind of drastic change whether that be positioning, removal of PR, banned from index, etc. and they are fully aware of something they did that may have caused that.