Hit hard, but not sure if I was penalized or what
- SEO |
First off, I was just to make it clear that I was the Google Masterclass sticky, which I found very informative to say the least. However, I have some questions since I'm not really sure whether my site was actually penalized or what and would like to explain my situation to see if I can get some advice from the experienced members here.
I run a consumers buyers guide for mens shoes that's been online for about 4-5 years now. The site contains over 6,000 articles and at the current rate, 5-6 new posts are being added per day. For years, the site has been considered an authority in its niche by both its readers and Google. Our search result listings have always been decent, even for some highly competitive keywords. New posts could usually be found in the search results within an hour after going live on the site. There was always a slew of Google bots crawling the site at all hours of the day.
When the whole Panda thing came about, things changed. And they changed quick. My traffic from Google was cut in half. Scrambling for answers, I jumped to my Google Webmaster Tools account and noticed a message from mentioning that my site was suspected of "unnatural linking" to other sites with the intent to manipulate PageRank.
I don't sell links with the purpose to manipulate PageRage nor have I ever bought links or participated in any linking schemes. In fact, I don't even submit articles or add my site to directories, as I don't have the time and wouldn't even know where to begin with some sort of automatic submissions program. Being a consumers buyers guide though, there are quite a few affiliate links on the site linking to retailers selling the shoes we're talking about. I would say 3 out of 10 posts contain an affiliate link. There's also 3-4 banners in the sidebar that are affiliate banners under the Google Affiliate Network. Furthermore, I link to a lot of the same sites (both affiliate and non-affiliate) on a regular basis since part of my job is informing people where the shoes are available.
Looking back at it all, I thought that maybe in the eyes of Google the links didn't look natural, although they are and there's no purpose to pass PageRank, just information on where to buy a product. I visited Google's help forum to ask some questions and a Google employee answered and suggested that I add a "nofollow" tag to ALL my affiliate and outgoing links, and that I should create a designated folder on my server for the affiliate banners on my sidebar and redirect people to the affiliate link through a php redirect, then block the bots from accessing the folder in the robots.txt file. Taking his advice, I spent 3-weeks going back through 6,000+ posts to add a nofollow attribute to the affiliate and outbound links, and doing all the other stuff mentioned.
It's been about three weeks since then and I've seen no changes thus far. I know it does take some time though.
My posts are still being indexed according to my webmaster tools and I still get updates from Google News about my posts being listed, so I know I was deindexed. At the same time though, I don't think I was penalized either. When you do a search for my site (i.e. mysite.com) the first listing is my site with several "sitelinks" listed below it. However, when your search for my site without the .com ending, it's listed third, without the sitelinks. Before the Panda updates and the email I received from Google about the unnatural links,
no matter how you search the name of my site, it always came up first with the sitelinks. Although they're being listed, the new posts aren't showing up until you go 6-7-8 pages deep into the search results whereas they use to show on the first page. I'm also noticing that before I'm able to locate my posts, I'm coming across tons of scrapper sites talking about the same product with duplicate content taken from another site in the niche.
What's the deal here. Was I penalized, sandboxed, or is it just an issue with a lack of backlinks? Is what the Google employee told me about adding nofollow to my affiliate and outbound links the right thing to do? I don't want it to look like a hogging the bots and my PageRage, but at the same time I don't want it to look like I'm just throwing a link out there just to throw a link out there. The links are always naturally placed (i.e. You can buy these shoes now through XXXXX for $180).
If you can give me any suggestions on what to do to improve my situation based on what I explained, I would love to hear what you have to say.
I run a consumers buyers guide for mens shoes that's been online for about 4-5 years now. The site contains over 6,000 articles and at the current rate, 5-6 new posts are being added per day. For years, the site has been considered an authority in its niche by both its readers and Google. Our search result listings have always been decent, even for some highly competitive keywords. New posts could usually be found in the search results within an hour after going live on the site. There was always a slew of Google bots crawling the site at all hours of the day.
When the whole Panda thing came about, things changed. And they changed quick. My traffic from Google was cut in half. Scrambling for answers, I jumped to my Google Webmaster Tools account and noticed a message from mentioning that my site was suspected of "unnatural linking" to other sites with the intent to manipulate PageRank.
I don't sell links with the purpose to manipulate PageRage nor have I ever bought links or participated in any linking schemes. In fact, I don't even submit articles or add my site to directories, as I don't have the time and wouldn't even know where to begin with some sort of automatic submissions program. Being a consumers buyers guide though, there are quite a few affiliate links on the site linking to retailers selling the shoes we're talking about. I would say 3 out of 10 posts contain an affiliate link. There's also 3-4 banners in the sidebar that are affiliate banners under the Google Affiliate Network. Furthermore, I link to a lot of the same sites (both affiliate and non-affiliate) on a regular basis since part of my job is informing people where the shoes are available.
Looking back at it all, I thought that maybe in the eyes of Google the links didn't look natural, although they are and there's no purpose to pass PageRank, just information on where to buy a product. I visited Google's help forum to ask some questions and a Google employee answered and suggested that I add a "nofollow" tag to ALL my affiliate and outgoing links, and that I should create a designated folder on my server for the affiliate banners on my sidebar and redirect people to the affiliate link through a php redirect, then block the bots from accessing the folder in the robots.txt file. Taking his advice, I spent 3-weeks going back through 6,000+ posts to add a nofollow attribute to the affiliate and outbound links, and doing all the other stuff mentioned.
It's been about three weeks since then and I've seen no changes thus far. I know it does take some time though.
My posts are still being indexed according to my webmaster tools and I still get updates from Google News about my posts being listed, so I know I was deindexed. At the same time though, I don't think I was penalized either. When you do a search for my site (i.e. mysite.com) the first listing is my site with several "sitelinks" listed below it. However, when your search for my site without the .com ending, it's listed third, without the sitelinks. Before the Panda updates and the email I received from Google about the unnatural links,
no matter how you search the name of my site, it always came up first with the sitelinks. Although they're being listed, the new posts aren't showing up until you go 6-7-8 pages deep into the search results whereas they use to show on the first page. I'm also noticing that before I'm able to locate my posts, I'm coming across tons of scrapper sites talking about the same product with duplicate content taken from another site in the niche.
What's the deal here. Was I penalized, sandboxed, or is it just an issue with a lack of backlinks? Is what the Google employee told me about adding nofollow to my affiliate and outbound links the right thing to do? I don't want it to look like a hogging the bots and my PageRage, but at the same time I don't want it to look like I'm just throwing a link out there just to throw a link out there. The links are always naturally placed (i.e. You can buy these shoes now through XXXXX for $180).
If you can give me any suggestions on what to do to improve my situation based on what I explained, I would love to hear what you have to say.
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