On February 11th, 2011 one of my affiliate websites received a Google penalty, and on March 5th I wrote a blog post about the issues that I thought brought on the Google Penalty. I then took what I thought were appropriate corrective actions to lift the penalty, and on May 16th, 2011 the penalty was lifted and the Website began converting sales that very same day. This blog post outlines the corrective actions I took that reversed the penalty.
I thought several issues that might have caused the penalty were the sudden growth of affiliate links as I became greedy with the sudden success of the website and lost focus on creating quality content. I also became lazy with my noindex and disallow rules on my robots.txt file and I was not cloaking my affiliate links. Basically I inadvertently created a thin affiliate Website and that’s why Google placed the penalty.
To reverse this Google penalty the following changes were made to the Website.
- Eliminated the “thin” affiliate blog posts (about 50% of blog content) and hid all remaining affiliate links from Google with redirects (Wordpress and CloakPig make this easy).
- Applied NoFollow to all affiliate links.
- Removed many of the unnecessary tags and the tag cloud.
- Eliminated all duplicate content including rewriting or deleting any duplicate product descriptions.
- Published new content that held value for the reader (I outsourced tutorial articles through TextBroker).
- Submitted a reinclusion request to Google on Webmaster Tools.
Once the above changes were made it was nothing more than a waiting game; it took nearly 90 days from the beginning of the penalty to the removal of the penalty. I suspect it was a manual penalty as the site was crawled many times during the penalty period yet the penalty was not lifted during those crawls. I submitted the reconsideration request on 3/10/2011 and on 4/2/11 received a message in Webmaster Tools that my request was processed. On 5/16/11 the penalty was removed and the site immediately rose back to it’s previous rankings.
Google doesn’t give you a specific reason why the penalty was placed on your site but I can only assume it was due to the issues I mentioned above.
Conclusion – If you strictly follow Google’s spam rules you shouldn’t have any issues with penaltys – at least for now.
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