“Do I have a Google penalty” is a question that comes up frequently from affiliate marketers and they often get a variety of responses that aren’t much help. So instead of relying on speculation from unknown sources one of the easiest ways to tell if you might be under a penalty is that if your analytics looks similar to the graph, and if it does it’s safe to say that you are probably under some type of a Google penalty.
The graphic above belongs to one of my affiliate Websites. Besides my lost search engine traffic another indicator that it’s under a penalty is that the home page is ranked in the 11th Google position for it’s own very unique name – excluding the TLD, and the site also lost rank for the many unique long-tails that I once captured traffic on.
I’m certainly not happy about my penalty on this once profitable website that is less than four months old. After all it was my newest project and it showed a lot of promise with slightly over $16,000 in sales in the last three weeks of the 2010 holiday shopping season. But I’m not crying over it either because I know where I went wrong and I know I can eventually reverse it into a once again profitable website.
I never had a penalty and when I first realized my site was penalized my reaction was that of the typical affiliate marketer.
“It wasn’t my fault, Google just hates affiliates. I poured hours into my content and it’s all original, Google just wants the small affiliates out of the equation”.
But after I had a chance to take a breather I realized what I had done to deserve this full penalty of Google’s law. You can follow the timespan of the graph and see how Google reacted to what I was doing. Because it was my project I took the liberty to do what I wanted, and I even knew better.
- In mid January I put myself under pressure to write content, but I was being greedy and the quality of the content became less priority and in only a few short weeks I had transformed my profitable site into something with the appearance of a thin affiliate site.
- I became so obsessed with churning out content that I abandoned the noindex/disallow rules I created and I left most of my affiliate links in plain view of the search engines. The site was polluted with affiliate links at this point.
- Although I created a strategy that generated some good links I also got sloppy and lazy and linked from a few of my other non-related sites.
The issues I mentioned above may not seem like such a detriment but you can see in the graph my attempt to fix things by removal of the low quality content and many of the affililate links was something Google noticed with a generous spike in traffic the very next day. At this point I had eliminated nearly 50% of my blog posts and affiliate links and thought I was granted forgiveness by Big G, but then the following day it was back to the penalty box for me.
I then removed the links from my non-related websites but nothing changed. Several of those links had authority so I’m wondering if they had nothing to do with the penalty and everything to do with my original success. In any event I need to isolate those websites from the penalized website, so the links will remain removed. I did some research and found others who have applied the same corrections to a penalty and experienced the same temporary spike in Google traffic, and with the penalty eventually being lifted after several weeks.
So the next step in my affiliate website triage is to get back to the strategies that always worked well for me in the first place, and that strategy is to build real content and slowly build new inbounds. I’ve already begun the process and will submit a reconsideration request when I feel the site is up to quality, if the re-indexing doesn’t take care of that for me.
Read my follow-up blog post about my recovery from this Google penalty.
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