Site Issues With Google

7 replies
Hi Warriors,

I'm having some problems with one of my affiliate sites. I'm still pretty new to the whole affiliate marketing thing so go with me.

First of all, the site is around a month old. I was ranking pretty well for most of my keywords and i was happy with the traffic. I added another 25 odd pages last week and over the weekend my rankings all took a hit, one primary keyword from page 2 to 43. I'm unsure if the additional pages are the reason why this has happened.

Now the niche i targeted is pretty common, but very low competitive, but it did have a lot of results. I presume my honeymoon period is now over OR I've received a slap from Google (sandboxed?).

I added around 30 - 40 decent backlinks over the month, added around 80 pages of content in which were affiliate products (which may have been seen as duplicated based on the code), and other pages which consisted of unique content. I checked Info:sitename.com/site:sitename.com and the pages have been indexed and showing.

What do Warriors suggest i do? Should i make this new batch of pages invisible again? Remove some backlinks (one was a blogroll and ended up sending 100 odd)? Add more backlinks? Re-edit some of the current pages? Add new unique content in article format? Any ideas would be fantastic.

My site access has decreased over 400% and a very limited amount of results are coming through the SERPS. I built some pages which really should be page one due to their lack of competition, but they are not in the first 5 or so.

I feel it's worth continuing to update as it has the potential to raise some good affiliate money. I'm patient and eager to learn, so this little hiccup is no problem, even if it means a few months waiting for it to come back.

Let me know if you need any other particular site information.

Cheers,

Adam
#google #issues #site
  • Profile picture of the author Paul200
    New sites will bounce around so give it more time to settle down. I would suggest not to blast it with to many backlinks just yet, because that could get you sandboxed.

    One of my sites took over a year to take off with steady search engine traffic comming in. The older the site the more ranking it will get
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    • Profile picture of the author mikeauton
      sounds like a classic case of too much, too soon...

      google likes stuff to seem NATURAL and what you did with your site = content and links is far from natural.

      google thinks you're trying to trick it in to ranking highly... which in a way you are.

      what happens now is largely guesswork but it's v poss you've been at the very least sandboxed in which case wait anyhitng up to a month to see your site bounce back...

      STOP posting content - v important

      i'm guessing all the links you've made are high quality 'do follow' links?

      if so, this is... bad - seriously.

      you need some LOW quality 'no follow' links becuase this looks NATURAL...

      spotting a theme?

      if you have these no follow links, do nothing for a month and see what happens to your site... you may get lucky and bounce back.

      i have a ton of articles about linking....

      this one is maybe a good start:

      Backlinks WARNING - How Much Is TOO MUCH...?

      all the best

      mike
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      • Profile picture of the author adammck
        Thanks Mike for your informative post.

        I'll stop posting content, no worries. The links are mostly Do Follow, but i had a few no follow, blog comments and the works. I'll spend some more time outdoors and fingers crossed it comes back soon.

        I guess this is a lesson learnt, but i definitely won't be doing a similar method again. Thanks for the article post mate!
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        • Profile picture of the author mikeauton
          Originally Posted by adammck View Post

          Thanks Mike for your informative post.

          I'll stop posting content, no worries. The links are mostly Do Follow, but i had a few no follow, blog comments and the works. I'll spend some more time outdoors and fingers crossed it comes back soon.

          I guess this is a lesson learnt, but i definitely won't be doing a similar method again. Thanks for the article post mate!
          no worries - glad to help
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  • Profile picture of the author Kauzmo
    Roll out your content with a natural progression. Maybe a few articles/pages per week.

    Make sure that your content:
    • Is written for the visitor and not Google
    • Unique
    • Easy to read
    • Easy to navigate
    • Did I mention UNIQUE?
    It sounds like you have a lot of time invested in the site. Stick with it, it will get back to where it should be. Just stay within Google's expectations and you should be good to go!
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  • Profile picture of the author Trapped
    New sites tend to "act" like that. Mike made a point of too much too soon however you should not stop completely posting new content. Why? As Mike pointed search engines have have triggers in their algorithm to notice unnatural behavior, just as it might have been unnatural to post all that content too soon it would also be unnatural to stop posting content at once.

    What I actually do in these situation (and you or someone else might not like the idea) is to create a plan where I would keep the site constantly active through;
    • New content
    • New incoming links
    • Diversified links
    • Diversified anchors
    • Diversified URL targets
    Also be aware of not turning your website into a way to thin affiliate, it is easily detected and filtered out. If you need to add product pages, then make sure to be able to write some content to that page, a review, user comments etc.. it just needs to look natural (even if it isn't).
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    • Profile picture of the author mikeauton
      Originally Posted by Trapped View Post

      New sites tend to "act" like that. Mike made a point of too much too soon however you should not stop completely posting new content. Why? As Mike pointed search engines have have triggers in their algorithm to notice unnatural behavior, just as it might have been unnatural to post all that content too soon it would also be unnatural to stop posting content at once.

      What I actually do in these situation (and you or someone else might not like the idea) is to create a plan where I would keep the site constantly active through;
      • New content
      • New incoming links
      • Diversified links
      • Diversified anchors
      • Diversified URL targets
      Also be aware of not turning your website into a way to thin affiliate, it is easily detected and filtered out. If you need to add product pages, then make sure to be able to write some content to that page, a review, user comments etc.. it just needs to look natural (even if it isn't).
      very good points...

      at some point defo post more content but MUCH slower... i'd still wait at least a few weeks tho.
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