Site was on page one until I put Amazon affiliate links on it

It may not be because of the affiliate links but the backlinks that point to your site. Google has been acting inconsistent lately. My site was affected also by the constant change in algorithm.

Thanks. I was pretty devastated when I saw my site drop. I think the Amazon affiliate links are the way to go.

I don't use site directories, actually. I write very detailed, thorough reviews that help people decide which product in a niche is best suited for them, use strong on-page SEO formatting of my reviews, and build backlinks through a number of channels.

There's a lot of information from experienced Amazon affiliates in this thread that you might find helpful: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ing-money.html

Good luck!

Without knowing more, I would guess the fact that you did not have much content on it and/or the lack of link building to it, was what led to the drop. I am like Sojourn - I never cloak my Amazon links and have never had an issue, so I bet that is not the issue. However, that is just a guess, as there are so many factors involved.

It was just a strange coincidence. The fact that you have affiliate links (or cloaked links for that matter) won't impact your rankings.

I just read an interesting article about Google seeing sites that have only affiliate links or links all pointing to a different site as a "Bridge" site.

In fact Andrew Hanson had an interesting blog post about changing affiliate links to no follow so it doesn't appear to Google that you are linking to another site to pass on page rank. You can read it here: 5 Ways To Avoid A Google Beatdown In 2011

Jan Roos also mentions the same thing in his Amazon course. He uses a link cloaking plugin and also makes his links no follow.

It's a royal pain to make links no follow, but from what I am reading it will pay off in the long run.

I have been putting it off thinking it didn't matter. But I have definitely changed my opinion.

HOpe this helps.

I posted on Google webmaster Central. I was told that to use Amazon affiliate links without "no-following" them is the same thing as paid advertising for Amazon. Which is against TOS.

Wordpress has a plugin that will make the links no follow. I have had success using it, but it will not fix image links.

If you do not no-follow your links, you are passing link juice to Amazon, as if they need it..

Hmm... it does make me wonder, I took affiliate links OFF my site once I got my shopping cart set up entirely and it seems to me, that was somewhat close to a time when my site rose considerably in the rankings.

While I hear people saying it doesn't matter and it's just a coincidence, I'm not completely convinced.

At one point when my site was doing horribly in the rankings I posted on a Google webmaster forum asking for advice and someone commented that my site looked "Spammy." When I finished crying, I asked them WHY they said that and the only reason they gave was that it had some affiliate links.

Google and its baby Panda are doing all sorts of interesting things this year. Trying to root out spammy Amazon affiliate stores is definitely one of them. They may just be temporarily pulling it away from the front page until their bots get a chance to do a "content review " and a "content to affiliate ad ratio review". Google is pretty determined to get rid of the content farms that people were using to manipulate page rank (just like they did in early 2000's with link farm burning...lol) as well as get rid of all the bull**** Amazon affiliate stores that Internet Marketers and Telemarketers have been flooding the internet with since 2003.

Its Google's attempt to make the search results more appealing and worthwhile to the people doing searches. In the end, the people doing the searching are the ones clicking the ads, so it makes sense that Google would want to keep them happy, ya know...

If you are running a straight-up Amazon Affiliate Gonna Be A Millionaire In 6 Months store.......you might want to work on another project really soon. On the other hand (which by your post, I think u fall in this category) if you just added Amazon to your site to help monetize it some more, I think you will be fine in a couple of days or so. While you are waiting, I recommend doing a back link check to be sure that nothing has made a drastic fall as well and make sure that you haven't fallen into any nasty link neighborhoods.

Best of luck.

I also have a theory about adsense. After seeing tons of spammy sites ranking well with adsense on them, I think Google gives them a boost when you put adsense on them. It makes total sense to me. They really want people to pay for advertising. They don't mind if a few spammy sites rise to the top if it pays them.

I now plan to work with Google. You can't beat them, that's for sure.

Maybe the Amazon link drew attention to a flaw on your site. Sometimes robots get set off by weird things... just a thought.

I recently got burned by google for using an amazon scraping bot to pull content. Stupid me and forgot to install the wp unique and no follow plugins since it was all within the first week of me setting up the site, but obviously one of the bots picked up on the "thin" doorway pages pretty soon and now I am stuck waiting back for a response from google because they pulled me from the index...really blows because I was making close to $100 a day and then wham nothing. My Question is if I do the same for another site and use the unique and no follow plugins with cloaked links should I be off the googlebot radar?

Did you nofollow your amazon links? If not, do so now.

A recent algorithm update punished sites that have "too much" advertising above the fold. Do you think that this could have been part of the problem? are the ads above the fold?

I would say remove them immediately untily ou come up with another way to monetize it.

How does having nofollow or do follow amazon links affect anything?