Recently penalized. I'm pretty sure I know why, the questions is: Now what?

[ChileconJefe]

I have been building my site steadily for the past 2 months or so. My main page (known as "MP" from here on out) was at the bottom of page 2 on Google for the main competitive keyword I'm going for. One of my other pages ("OP" from here on out) was at the bottom of page 1 for a secondary competitive keyword. I'm using Wordpress with the All-in-one SEO plugin on my site as well.

About 1 week ago, I noticed that my site description I had entered in the All-in-One SEO plugin for "OP" had a typo. I went back into Wordpress to correct the typo.

The next day, I went to check on my site ranking and noticed it was penalized. Both "MP" and "OP" are no longer in the top 1000 search results for either keywords (oddly enough, a third page on the site ranks on the 10th page or so for the secondary keyword).

It's been a week and I haven't seen any change. I've still been steadily building backlinks. I also submitted my site for reconsideration using webmaster tools. Do I just wait it out? Should I stop sending backlinks using my keywords as anchor text? Please help! If there's any other info you need, I'll be glad to help. Thanks!

[wolfmmiii]

Originally Posted by Ron Hitson

Here's your problem. The days of YOU building backlinks are over. Those days or behind us.

OP - Please, please, please disregard this ridiculous advice.

[Lares]

I doubt it has anything to do with you changing description on 1 page. You have probably been Pandalized or maybe sandboxed if you built your links to aggressively. Just wait some time your site will probably come back. And keep building backlinks, if you listen to Matt Cutts and wait for other people link to you, you will never rank.

[wolfmmiii]

Originally Posted by Ron Hitson

I have no issue with you telling the OP to ignore my advicee but at least back up your claims.


We are all entitled to our own views but at least give the OP something to work with that way they can make an informed decision.

Ron

OK, it's very easy. Google has ZERO way of knowing who is doing the linking unless you announce it to them.

Do you really think Google can tell who wrote the Hub, or the Squidoo Lens, or the Blogger blog that is linking to your site???

[MikeFriedman]

Originally Posted by Ron Hitson

I have no issue with you telling the OP to ignore my advicee but at least back up your claims. Doesn't bother me at all.


We are all entitled to our own views but at least give the OP something to work with that way they can make an informed decision.

If it turns out that you make a sound argument so be it but at least provide something of value

Ron

I have quite a few keywords that are in the top 3 in Google right now by "manipulating the search engines" as you put it.

None of them were ever effected by any Panda update.

Do I do guest blogging, link exchanges, etc? Absolutely. I do those activities as well as my own link building.

Do I build new websites and then sit around hoping people will want to link to them (even though nobody knows they exist and they have no rankings)? Hell no.

[ChileconJefe]

Originally Posted by Lares

I doubt it has anything to do with you changing description on 1 page. You have probably been Pandalized or maybe sandboxed if you built your links to aggressively. Just wait some time your site will probably come back. And keep building backlinks, if you listen to Matt Cutts and wait for other people link to you, you will never rank.

I'm almost certain I haven't been linking too aggressively. I did up the amount going to my main site a little bit, but that was over 2 weeks ago. This happened immediately after I changed the site description via the SEO plugin 1 week ago, which is why I think that is the culprit. I could be wrong though. Just in case, I'll go back to building backlinks the way I did before a couple weeks ago.

So basically I just have to wait it out? How long does it typically take to get unsandboxed/unpenalized?

[Lares]

If this happened October 13/14th then is most probably Panda.
are you affected by Google Panda update Oct 13 2011

I changed my description many times before and never got any drop. In worst case you could lose some rankings on that particular page but not on whole site. Can take few days to few weeks to get out of sandbox. When my website is unstable and jumping around i just build some non-anchor (http://website.com) backlinks. If panda hit you then probably there isn't much you can do, only to wait.

[Lares]

Originally Posted by Ron Hitson

And they'll be right back here in 6 months with the same question: Why is my website deindexed


A site can rank for thousands of keywords that you did not even target. You guys get so caught up into ranking when all you have to do is put out content that's is relevant and of quality.

But I guess since you know more about how to do it, we should listen to you.

I am rather deindexed in 6 months with some $$ in my pocket than wondering why i still dont have any visitor. And its nearly impossible to deindex a website with link building.

[HN]

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

Do I do guest blogging, link exchanges, etc? Absolutely. I do those activities as well as my own link building.

Do I build new websites and then sit around hoping people will want to link to them (even though nobody knows they exist and they have no rankings)? Hell no.

This is great that we have 99% of population stuck in ratrace forever. It would be difficult for us 1% if everyone else started creating value, rather than chasing easy money. It all boils down to whether you want to be one OF a million doing exact same thing everyone else is doing, building links, chasing long tail keywords or you want to be one IN a million and stand out.
There are 2 types of webmasters, that
#1 Provide value, work hard and reap the benefits for the rest of their life, (creators of Yahoo, Facebook, Youtube) get natural links, rankings, word of mouth. Hell, what I am talking about, they don't even depend on google rankings.
#2 Chase the train all their life - wake up, post some articles, spam blogs, buy links, go to sleep and repeat. Yes, some will make a lot of money doing this.

What is the difference? If #1 site goes viral, the backlinks start building up exponentially. If you want to compete with such site you have spend more and more money every month on paid backlinks.

Some people obviously don't know that there are other ways to get the site noticed in the first place, other than guest blogging and link exchanges.

[razorhound]

Originally Posted by ChileconJefe

I have been building my site steadily for the past 2 months or so. My main page (known as "MP" from here on out) was at the bottom of page 2 on Google for the main competitive keyword I'm going for. One of my other pages ("OP" from here on out) was at the bottom of page 1 for a secondary competitive keyword. I'm using Wordpress with the All-in-one SEO plugin on my site as well.

About 1 week ago, I noticed that my site description I had entered in the All-in-One SEO plugin for "OP" had a typo. I went back into Wordpress to correct the typo.

The next day, I went to check on my site ranking and noticed it was penalized. Both "MP" and "OP" are no longer in the top 1000 search results for either keywords (oddly enough, a third page on the site ranks on the 10th page or so for the secondary keyword).

It's been a week and I haven't seen any change. I've still been steadily building backlinks. I also submitted my site for reconsideration using webmaster tools. Do I just wait it out? Should I stop sending backlinks using my keywords as anchor text? Please help! If there's any other info you need, I'll be glad to help. Thanks!

You don't even have to submit for reconsideration, it's only one week. How old is your site?

Bryan

[MaverickUK]

Originally Posted by Ron Hitson

Here's your problem. The days of YOU building backlinks are over. Those days or behind us. It's time to get to work and build high quality websites with relevant content that gets linked by humans. Those days of trying to manipulate the S.E.'s are over.

you've submitted your website for reconsideration and you're still trying to game the Search Engines by manually building backlinks? I'd stop with the back link stuff RIGHT NOW!

Read these 2 posts I wrote about SEO as it relates to a similar situation:

Post 1

Post 2

Ignore him. He's talking rubbish. If you want proof that he's talking rubbish, check out my Google reconsideration request. I've been building backlinks myself personally to the affiliate website in question and the reconsideration request was accepted.

Ron, if you knew so much for a fact that his website won't have the penalty removed, then why oh why was i lucky to have my websites algorithmic penalty removed?

Please stop trying to scaremonger with this rubbish. I've seen you mention stuff like this is numerous posts now and all you're doing is scaring newbies off from making the step in to affiliate marketing. Stop pretending like self building backlinks is in effective - we both know it's not.

[HN]

Originally Posted by MaverickUK

Please stop trying to scaremonger with this rubbish. I've seen you mention stuff like this is numerous posts now and all you're doing is scaring newbies off from making the step in to affiliate marketing. Stop pretending like self building backlinks is in effective - we both know it's not.

Flipping burgers ain't ineffective either, because we all know that you get paid for doing this. It's about whether you want to flip burgers or own McDonalds. People have different goals and values. Your value obviously is flipping burgers.

[JennyBizz]

Just keep on doing what you're doing and you will be fine. 99% of the time that this happens, the site will pop back up for those keywords even higher than they were to start with. You'll be fine. : )

[MaverickUK]

Originally Posted by HN

Flipping burgers ain't ineffective either, because we all know that you get paid for doing this. It's about whether you want to flip burgers or own McDonalds. People have different goals and values. Your value obviously is flipping burgers.

You must be crazy. Literally, insane. Do you really think Paula & Wanda of Affiliate Blog Online: Internet Marketing, Amazon Marketing, Learn How to Make Money Online were planning on 'flipping burgers'? They have a few Amazon review websites that use various back linking methods including guest blogging, yet they're making over $25,000 a month.

Would you call that flipping burgers as you put it? Your post i'm afraid wreaks of madness.

[HN]

Originally Posted by MaverickUK

You must be crazy. Literally, insane. Do you really think Paula & Wanda of Affiliate Blog Online: Internet Marketing, Amazon Marketing, Learn How to Make Money Online were planning on 'flipping burgers'? They have a few Amazon review websites that use various back linking methods including guest blogging, yet they're making over $25,000 a month.

Would you call that flipping burgers as you put it? Your post i'm afraid wreaks of madness.

I think it's going to be a big surprise to you, but websites making $250,000 a day (day, not month) might, in fact, consider $25,000 per month as good as flipping burgers. Rather expensive burgers, I must admit. Try to impress Mark Zuckerberg with $25,000 per month.

I don't quite get it why are you showing this number and talk about scaring newbies. Are you trying to say all newbies can make that kind of money.
Why not, just flip 25,000 burgers a month. It's easy.

Do you prefer to make $25,000 as an Amazon affiliate or own Amazon? Please give me an honest answer.

[MaverickUK]

Originally Posted by HN

I think it's going to be a big surprise to you, but websites making $250,000 a day (day, not month) might, in fact, consider $25,000 per month as good as flipping burgers. Rather expensive burgers, I must admit. Try to impress Mark Zuckerberg with $25,000 per month.

I don't quite get it why are you showing this number and talk about scaring newbies. Are you trying to say all newbies can make that kind of money.
Why not, just flip 25,000 burgers a month. It's easy.

To be honest, how many people do you think will be aiming for $25,000 a day? Making $100,000 a day might seem to be flipping burger money to some, but your comparisons are quite daft, let's be honest here. Who in their right mind would complain with making $25,000 a month, unless they were in a previously better place before?

You're comparing the super-rich to the ones making a comfortable living and it really doesn't make any sense. We're not Mark Zuckerberg, the majority of the people on this forum are looking to make a decent wage and get the most money they can - this is obtainable by doing the exact opposite of what Ron suggests.

I'm not trying to say all newbies are going to make that much at all. However in the world of affiliate marketing money is only as limited as the work you put in - hell, if people try hard enough $25,000 a day is obtainable.

The reason i mentioned $25,000 was because Paula and Wanda were newbies too, starting out in the world of IM/Affiliate Marketing back in 2008 or so and just two years later they were hitting over $15,000 a month in just Amazon commissions. This pretty much proves that if they can do it, so can the majority of other people with hard work.

Are you trying to make a point here anyway? I don't think it worked.

[JMac]

Just a few thoughts about things so far...

1. Google does not know why the links were made, were they made by someone who liked your content or did you spam them, there is no way to know in a link my link analysis. However... If Google sees that a majority of your links are all coming from forum signatures, it does give them an indication you are spamming.

2. Google says what they WANT you to think/do. If forum profiles did help build your site and google actually admitted it, forums around the world would get crushed and sales of xrummer would go through the roof. Google is in the business of making the internet a better place to get people to use its service so it is in their best interest to direct people to do things in a way that would make the internet a better place and discourage people from spamming.

3. SEO is changing and many of the things that used to work are a lot less effective today. The internet is always changing and so should our tactics if we wish to keep moving forward.

4. Even when something works for you, you can not be 100% sure that it was what YOU did that made it happen. Someone else getting penalized or an algoritum change or a sudden flood of traffic from some article you posted, anything could have happened to make your site move up. Just because you did something and your site moved up, it does not always mean that what YOU did caused the movement.

In the end, collect as much data as you can. Track the websites that are higher than you, keep an eye on the backlinks they have and if it is changing. Document everything you do and track the results of your websites. In the end, you will have a good idea of what works and what does not work. Keep doing the things you think work and keep trying to do them better.

[HN]

Originally Posted by MaverickUK

Are you trying to make a point here anyway? I don't think it worked.

The only point I am trying to make here is that you most likely will be telling your kids to find a good company to work hard for (google, amazon, clickbank), rather than telling them to work hard to build a good company and have other people work for them. Our argument has nothing to do with the amount of money you can earn while working for someone or while having someone work for you. It's about whether you prefer to be an employee or employer. If you depend on google and it slaps you there goes your income. If you own amazon and have 100,000 affiliates?
Whatever you or I say, we both know that 99% of people will continue to work for someone else anyway. The world would just seize to exist if everyone started minding their own business. In this way no matter how much money they made it would not be enough to buy food if it's only grown by a handful of farmers. It's good we have people like you that would work hard for someone else instead of taking a risk and start their own business. Or who think that working for someone else IS a great business. I will be happy if you can make $25,000 a month selling my products, because I will be making about $70,000. And I'd be glad if you refer 100 people to me and get paid $5,000 for each referral. In fact I'd be happy to make you rich. Do you know why?

The fact is, it is as easy to build a service (amazon) as it is to build an affiliate site. With pretty much the same effort you get very different results. Just have to come up with a great idea.

[midiwhale]

@ChileconJefe

Interesting. ask 3 people. get 8 answers ;-)

SEO isn't black and white and anyone who can nail it 100% would be very rich indeed.

I just want to add 2 things which are important to you.

1) Now you have started backlinking, do NOT stop!!!
That would not be natural and search engines may connect the dots.
Also no new backlinks means, no new backlinks!

You may want to reduce the amount of links you do, and go to higher quality link sources, but ramp that down over time (90 days) to end up to your base level.

2) Make sure you are DEEP linking with these backlinks, ie to other pages within your site.
Again that would only be natural. People don;t only like your home page

3) The biggest SEO boost you can give yourself is to top up your SEO activities with some high quality sources - even just 6 a month will really pay dividends over time.

high quality sources, usually means doing it by hand, so I'm sure you get the idea.

Any way, do not stop, now you started.

Keep adding content. Keep backlinking to it, but make sure you add in some quality backlink sources all the time.

BTW it isn't that uncommon to have your ranking roller coaster for several weeks. Especially if new competition have started vying for your spot.

That's why I prefer not to base my income only on "SEO".

(list building, social, ads, etc.)

Peter

[MaverickUK]

Originally Posted by HN

The only point I am trying to make here is that you most likely will be telling your kids to find a good company to work hard for (google, amazon, clickbank), rather than telling them to work hard to build a good company and have other people work for them. Our argument has nothing to do with the amount of money you can earn while working for someone or while having someone work for you. It's about whether you prefer to be an employee or employer. If you depend on google and it slaps you there goes your income. If you own amazon and have 100,000 affiliates?
Whatever you or I say, we both know that 99% of people will continue to work for someone else anyway. The world would just seize to exist if everyone started minding their own business. In this way no matter how much money they made it would not be enough to buy food if it's only grown by a handful of farmers. It's good we have people like you that would work hard for someone else instead of taking a risk and start their own business. Or who think that working for someone else IS a great business. I will be happy if you can make $25,000 a month selling my products, because I will be making about $70,000. And I'd be glad if you refer 100 people to me and get paid $5,000 for each referral. In fact I'd be happy to make you rich. Do you know why?

The fact is, it is as easy to build a service (amazon) as it is to build an affiliate site. With pretty much the same effort you get very different results. Just have to come up with a great idea.

Okay, now i see where you're coming from, sorry about that but you totally lost me. I agree it would be ideal if we could all be the top dog and have minions working for us, earning money whilst we lap up the money.

However this isn't always an easy task to undertake. This is something i'd love to do in the future once i have the funds available to me, however in the meantime i'd be happy working for the likes of you, earning you money, whilst earning myself a considerable amount too.

It's all about starting off small and growing into something as big as you can realise, so as a start i don't see affiliate marketing as much of a problem for those, like me, who just want to start earning a sustainable income in the meantime.

And about the Google slap thing. I think it's the same for any business, there are always going to be risks but it just so happens with affiliate marketing and the like the risk is the risk of Google bitch slapping you in to oblivion. If i owned a brick and mortar business, there would be a risk of it all going down the pan and me losing everything i had worked for. I guess it's all risk vs reward really.

[Matt Ward]

I would never file a reconsideration request if I wasn't sure I was penalized. This is guaranteeing that you're going to get a human evaluation, and if you were building links with spam you can probably kiss your site goodbye...

[JayBlogMan83]

Google has gotten smarter with the recent updates. I lost about 2 pages and all I ever did was leave a comment here and there. They seem to be getting stricter and know what we were up to. In the words of the famous movie line.... "The Jig is up"

[JayBlogMan83]

Originally Posted by Matt Ward

I would never file a reconsideration request if I wasn't sure I was penalized. This is guaranteeing that you're going to get a human evaluation, and if you were building links with spam you can probably kiss your site goodbye...

MATT how do you go about filing for reconsideration on a page? Thanks for letting me know..

[MaverickUK]

Originally Posted by Matt Ward

I would never file a reconsideration request if I wasn't sure I was penalized. This is guaranteeing that you're going to get a human evaluation, and if you were building links with spam you can probably kiss your site goodbye...

Matt, what exactly would you class as spam? I build links such as article, web 2.0, BMR and other types of links to one of my websites which recently had all penalties lifted on the domain after failing a reconsideration request.

[d0rhk]

Originally Posted by Ron Hitson

I have no issue with you telling the OP to ignore my advicee but at least back up your claims. Doesn't bother me at all.

If it turns out that you make a sound argument so be it but at least provide something of value

Ron

When have you ever provided something of value? You only ever post saying "backlinking is bad". Why are you so against backlinking? How do you get traffic? How do you rank higher in the search engines? You never say how you do it.

Listen to your own advice.

[Lyanna]

Originally Posted by Lares

If this happened October 13/14th then is most probably Panda.
are you affected by Google Panda update Oct 13 2011

This is the most likely cause. Since the Google algo changed, this might have affected your site.

It might also be that while your own website was not affected, the websites where you had your links on were affected and made your links less valuable.

Look at the SERPs - did many websites on the first page change? Are some of them on Youtube, Amazon or the top authority aged websites in your niche? This algo change is what caused that since it apparently/supposedly gave a boost to big authority sites.

What you can do: if some of the current top websites in the SERPs are forums, start posting there. If its a bunch of Youtube vids, make your own vids and post them with the same/similar title and tags because this helps get your vid on the "related videos" links.

Basically, use those big authority sites to link to your own stuff. Do this in a good non-spammy way that adds value for the website visitors.