I think I have made a mistake while I am doing my SEO for my blog. Maybe its the 'participation in link schemes' thing I which have read in the google's webmaster guideline. I am having a sharp decrease in the number of pageviews for a few days now. Instead of at least 150 page views a day (can't say that its high, because I just started for only 3 weeks), now I am experiencing page views as low as 50 a day. Did google ban me? I can still see my site when I inserted the site:poomdomain.com in the google seach box, so whats the problem?

I have to admit that I had made a link pool with one of my pages a few days ago, and I submited my sites to many other sites with niche non-related to mine, linking it. I have already corrected the link pool thing by deleting most of the links non-related to my topic, but the part that is still leaving me confused right now is the site submission.

For many of us, site submission is basically the core of SEO. If we can submit our URL to only some of the directories within our niche, and not any other which can be found abundantly on the internet, then how can we succeed in promoting our website effectively? So the next question for me to Google will be 'To what extent of website submission and linking is considered "participation in link schemes"'? Is it like, submitting your URL to thousands of websites at a short period of time? Or maybe you submit your URL to a few websites everyday, but those sites are still off your niche?

Maybe I am still unclear about the specifics about this 'link scheme' thing, so maybe if any of you guys are reading this, can you tell me what it is actually? Can I still submit my URL to other sites, a few at a time, once a day, but the sites are off my niche? Please, I need your help this time. I don't want to be banned from google.