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...