How I got penalized by Google and recovered.

Hi,

In the last week of November I started with my site on dating, ex back etc. Working many hours google brought me around the 60 visitors a day around the second week of January. I got all happy and saw myself sitting below a palm tree with four beautiful women next to me.

But then I woke up a certain monday morning and put on my computer to see that my site had gone from google. After two weeks of reading, hard work and lots of help I am back again today. I made many mistakes but see it as valuable information for the rest of my career. Also I did some things well, after all I am back where I wanted to be. I write this post mainly as a reminder for myself but if you have good ideas or remarks to make please feel free.

So What happened?

Early January, 6 weeks after going live:
1. My site ranked well, got more and more traffic. On top of that I found a nice affiliate deal.
2. Went on with linkbuilding through blog comments.
3. Added new content almost daily.
Then"
All of a sudden a drop of about 50 in my rankings and for some words my had disappeared completely.
4. Immediately started looking for what might be the cause:

I found out a lot through this post:

10 Ways to Diagnose a Google Penalty | Search Engine Journal

- Made sure that it really was a penalty (followed the steps that are described)
- Learned that there are many possible causes for a penalty.
- That Google Webmaster central is essential in this process.(which I used from the beginning)


Then the big search for causes started, as I have used many blogs and resources I cannot recall where I got the information from. I can only say that there is lots of information out there.


Possible causes I found first:


- My Link profile depends on blog comments.
- Some sites I posted comments on got flooded with spammy comments later.
- Sitemap was different from actual pages. Disclaimer could not be accessed from site but was visible in sitemap, same for 2 other pages.

I solved the sitemap issue and removed links from some dodgy sites.

I went to the Google Webmaster central, and filed for reinclusion, stating I was a nice guy who was so stupid to use blog comments for linkbuilding. And that some of the blogs got hacked by people spamming the blogs.

Nothing happened.


Possible causes found after one week.

- My theme is Prosense and through bad neighborhood link checker http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm I found out, that through the links I forgot to remove in the footer, bad sites like Pharma and Sex sites could be accessed.

- Some 404 pages on my site.

Removed them both nothing happened.

Last week:

- I found out that too many affiliate links are very bad for the SEO of a site. As I had added 2 or more links to Clickbank and other sites on each page. This might have been the main reason of my drop . GREED

-Therefore I removed all the links and send them to two pages, where O have added three links to the affiliate provider. I added a NOFOLLOW tag to these links just as google tells us to do.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736


After this I filed for reinclusion and now I am up again.

I hated the penalty but learned lots from this situation. I am happy I put on webmaster central at an early stage. I was stupid to file for reinclusion shortly after the penalty, before doing elaborate research. Still I am not entirely sure whether the reinclusion request helped to get my site back on track.

Main cause is in hindsight: Too many Affiliate links...
Also bad neighborhood and link profile could be the cause, I would urge everyone to use the bad neigborhood checker, to find and remove any bad outbound links!

From now on I am going to work with a free download and an autoresponder, not only selling more but also be SEO-friendly.

Thanks for everyone who helped me!