Google Issues Stern Warning to Affiliate Sites

[Simon]

@Housekeeper - I figured you were already on the basic white hat path anyway, so I was mostly just putting some things out there to see if anyone wanted to talk about them.

Perhaps G banned me, it's looking that way.

If this is a new project and you didn't do something overtly black hat, there's no reason they should have banned your site. Or even penalized it. But since you used the word "perhaps," let's look at how to remove some doubt in case anyone doesn't know.

• Can you find the site by searching for www.domain.com or for domain.com? If you can find it that way, it's not banned.

• Can you find the site by searching for site:www.domain.com or for site:domain.com? If you get a message saying "your search did not match any documents" then your site is mostly likely banned.

Is this a new registration? Sometimes new domains get indexed and ranked (the Honeymoon) but then drop out for a while.

So my thinking is to continue to optimize in the way I've been doing, at least Bing treats us well.

Yes, it seems Bing still adds points for on-site optimization. Unfortunately, you can only lose points with Google for things you do incorrectly on-site. Anything good you do on-site is just what's expected if you don't want to get slapped. These days, if you want to rank well with the Big G it's the off-site stuff that makes the difference.

But you have to step carefully out there...

[housekeeper]

Yeah, I'm not banned, just a little paranoid I 'spose. I was able to find the site on page 2 for a specific keyword, which I'm happy about and given the infancy of the site, I'll take it. Simply a matter of just working it and getting the content out there. So many of my other sites have been ravaged after the Hummingbird, I think there' s far more credence in working the social media circuit and finding different avenues to ge incoming traffic. Working with the porn star had instant impact, it's a rough tow as a short order cook, 4 sure.

Great cartoon!

[Cleo]

Wow, just finally had the time to read through this thread.

Originally Posted by Simon

I'll grab a copy of that and take a look when I get some time. It looks decent and somewhat up to date from what I saw in the TOCs and sample chapter, and read on the author's site. At the least it doesn't seem filled with harmful info like so many other SEO books and guides that were written too long ago.

Just noticed you posted that you finished reading it. Anything seem really helpful?

It had a bunch of resources that I didn't know about. Much of the stuff it talked about was stuff that I already knew, but clarified them for me.