Affiliate Website Slapping
-
Hi There
I recently launched a very large website - rich in good quality content, nice design and good onsite SEO.
The website is a 100 + pages and gives the user informative content.
In terms of SEO and linking building - a few guest posts, PR's and directories have been submitted.
All links have been relevant and quality. No spam links used at all and the number of links submitted has been very low. Only a handful..
We have seen a significant drop in rankings and I am scratching my head as to why.
My worry is that Google has slapped us for having an affiliate link on the website.
Each page - except the homepage has one advert on them. The advert includes an affiliate link.
Does anyone have any recent experience of affiliate websites been slapped?
Can anyone help???
Much Appreciated
-
Advertisements can definitely reduce the quality of your website in Google's eyes, however, if your site as a whole is informative, 100+ pages and optimized as you described, I might take a quick look at over optimization of link anchor text or the site for competitive keywords. Definitely check WMT for any warnings from G as well and, be aware, that the Hummingbird algorithm just rolled out.
Also, are the affiliate links set to rel=no follow?
-
There are some theories that pages with affiliate links suffer in rankings, but I haven't seen anything conclusive. It happens that many of those sites are also poor quality.
Depending on the press releases and directories you chose, those could be your issue. Sometime in July Google stated they are going to crack down on links earned from press releases:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en
"Links with optimized anchor text in articles or press releases distributed on other sites."
Many directories are seen as spam by search engines because it isn't naturally obtained. In that same page linked above, it states "Low-quality directory or bookmark site links".
An article about links from press releases from searchengineland:
It is hard to say for certain without seeing the site, the press releases, or the directory links but that might provide some insight. It also could depend on how recent your launch was, rankings can be volatile for new sites.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do content copycats (plagiarism) hurt original website rankings?
Hi all, Found some websites stolen our content and using the same sentences in their website pages. Does this content hurt our website rankings? Their DA is low, still we are worried about the damage about this plagiarism. Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
How can i Rank this website
here is my website www.onlinehackingtricks.com with fresh content and with proper on page seo but if i will do some off page seo then google will give penality to me because my one website got deindexed so how can i rank this?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SEORAMAN0 -
Website "A Record" in DNS - Geotargetting
Hi, Our online shop is hosted with a French IP address. It is available in English and Spanish. I have noticed, as to be expected, that we get quite a few french visitors, probably related to our IP address Google must think its geo related. We don't want to particularly target any specific country, but more so english and spanish speakers. Can you have various A records around the world to help with this? Any suggestions or things I could look into?? thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | bjs20100 -
Footer Link in International Parent Company Websites Causing Penalty?
Still waiting to look at the analytics for the timeframe, but we do know that the top keyword dropped on or about April 23, 2012 from the #1 ranking in Google - something they had held for years, and traffic dropped over 15% that month and further slips since. Just looked at Google Webmaster Tools and see over 2.3MM backlinks from "sister" compainies from their footers. One has over 700,000, the rest about 50,000 on average and all going to the home page, and all using the same anchor text, which is both a branded keyword, as well as a generic keyword, the same one they ranked #1 for. They are all "nofollows" but we are trying to confirm if the nofollow was before or after they got hit, but regardless, Google has found them. To also add, most of sites are from their international sites, so .de, .pl, .es, .nl and other Eurpean country extensions. Of course based on this, I would assume the footer links and timing, was result of the Penguin update and spam. The one issue, is that the other US "sister" companies listed in the same footer, did not see a drop, in fact some had increase traffic. And one of them has the same issue with the brand name, where it is both a brand name and a generic keyword. The only note that I will make about any of the other domains is that they do not drive the traffic this one used to. There is at least a 100,000+ visitor difference among the main site, and this additional sister sites also listed in the footer. I think I'm on the right track with the footer links, even though the other sites that have the same footer links do not seem to be suffering as much, but wanted to see if anyone else had a different opinion or theory. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | LeverSEO
Jen Davis0 -
Website Spam Backlinks Solution
I have been doing some back-link checking and found that 25% of the total back-links to my PR5 site are Spam and generated over the past 8 weeks. There are 189 links in total from 38 different domains and the anchor text is a combination of 'ugg boots for women' from TLDs in China, Russia and North Korea. The PR of these sites is 15 are n/a, 12 are 0 and the other 11 range between 1 - 6. More interestingly, all the links point to 1 single page on the domain. I have taken down that page now and wondering if I should 'disavow' the offending links in Google and Bing? Clearly with such a high % of my total links now being Spam, I want to be proactive so this does not hurt my rankings in search. If a Spambot is behind it then the issue is going to get worse moving forward. Any advice is welcome...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Ubique0 -
Negative SEO on my website with paid +1's
Hi guys, I need a piece of advice. Some scumbag played me quite well with paid +1's on my two articles and now I'm in a problem.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Fastbridge
http://sr.stateofseo.com/seo-vesti/google-implementacija-ssl-protokola-not-provided-problem/
http://sr.stateofseo.com/napredni-seo/najnovije-promene-google-panda-algoritma/
They are both translated articles (written originally by me on the same website). I've noticed those +1's (476 on both articles) when my website received a penalty for "SEO" keyword on Google.rs (Serbian Google) and I'm now on the 11th page.
Other keywords still rank just fine. Not cool, right? Now, I think there could be two solutions:
First one is to remove my inner link that's pointing to my homepage with "SEO" anchor, and hope for the best. Second one is to completely remove/delete those two articles and wait for Google to reindex the website and hopefully remove my ban. Do you guy have some other ideas how can I fix this or remove / disavow those +1 or somehow explain to the Google crew / algo that I'm just a humble SEO without any evil thoughts? 🙂 Thank you in advance.0 -
Pages higher than my website in Google have fewer links and a lower page authority
Hi there I've been optimising my website pureinkcreative.com based on advice from SEOMoz and at first this was working as in a few weeks the site had gone from nowhere to the top of page three in Google for our main search term 'copywriting'. Today though I've just checked and the website is now near the bottom of page four and competitors I've never heard of are above my site in the rankings. I checked them out on Open Site Explorer and many of these 'newbies' have less links (on average about 200 less links) and a poorer page authority. My page authority is 42/100 and the newly higher ranking websites are between 20 and 38. One of these pages which is ranking higher than my website only has internal links and every link has the anchor text of 'copywriting' which I've learnt is a bad idea. I'm determined to do whiter than white hat SEO but if competitors are ranking higher than my site because of 'gimmicks' like these, is it worth it? I add around two blog posts a week of approx 600 - 1000 words of well researched, original and useful content with a mix of keywords (copywriting, copywriter, copywriters) and some long tail keywords and guest blog around 2 - 3 times a month. I've been working on a link building campaign through guest blogging and comment marketing (only adding relevant, worthwhile comments) and have added around 15 links a week this way. Could this be why the website has dropped in the rankings? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks very much. Andrew
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andrewstewpot0 -
Interesting Case Study. Website with 70 PA and 73 DA but PR 0?
http://www.jewelry.hyper-info.com/ This website has no backlinks reported on google, but loads of backlinks across the web. It also doesn't even rank top 50 on its topic keyword [Jewelry Tips]. I would be very wary of building a link on a site like this, but thats my opinion. How would you rate this websites link based on this data?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | 13375auc30