I’m always looking for extra incomes and especially ones that will tick over themselves and require little input from me, but has my own lack of thought been my downfall. I think that I could have had a nice little earning site as rankings and traffic where both climbing nicely, but now I guess I’m going to need to start adding more content to each page.

A few months (2011-06-14) ago I bought a keyword rich domain which had a few links from articlesbase.com, and I decided I was going to put WordPress on and go from there. I was already using Amazon’s affiliate scheme on another site I have so after some digging around, I found out that Amazon had just launched Javari which sells Shoes & Handbags.

I then found WPzonbuilder which allowed me to pull in products from Amazon / Javari, which was ideal as it saved me a big chunk of time and all I would need to do is tweak the titles & URL’s and add a little bit of content, this then allowed me to manually post the products. After a few weeks the site had a good chunk of pages and traffic was naturally starting to come.

So to cut a long story short, up until 30/08/2011 the site was ranking top10 for most of its categories which were brands.

Now I’m speculating that my site’s been penalised for either mass linking back to Amazon or lack of content on posts, I’m guessing the latter.

Heres an example of a ranking from my site.

Keyword 1 was 7th on a category page before the drop, now its 230′s with a product page

How do i know if my website is penalised or banned.

If its penalised then you will still have most if not all your pages indexed in Google. I’ve used my main blog here to show what it should look like, if you have been penalised.

A penalty in Google usually means a drop in rankings so a -10 Penalty sees you drop 10 places from your last result. Although penalties of this style are getting less frequent.

PageRank Penalties, have little to do with search results, but are often an insight into a site selling links, so we’re not talking about fluctuation in PR more of completely loss of Pr from 4 to Grey Bar.

Use “site:” then your domain to find your result, if you get no results like the below picture then you’ve got no pages indexed and are more than likely banned.

Common Issues for Google penalty’s or being banned

1: Buying Links : You’ll know if you’ve been buying links.

So try to get these removed and then go for a reconsideration request. This is asking Google to look over your site with a fine tooth comb so make sure you don’t have any other issues.

2: Duplicate Content :  This is you copying other peoples content from their site

Duplicate content is always best avoid so writing new and fresh content is always the best way even though it takes more work than hitting Ctrl + C whilst on a competitors site. Some internal Duplicate content will always happen. I.E

blue_widget.html & coloured_widgets.html The example would see a snippet of text on the coloured_widgets.html category page in a listing for the product blue_widget.html

But having your Search Page return over 5k results isn’t good so applying  a meta tag of “noindex” to your search page would see this problem resolved.

If you want to check your search page to see if its been indexed then do a search on your site and you’ll get something likewww.colouredwidgets.co.uk/search, just put this into Google with site: then your address and hopefully nothing will be returned.

3: Thin Affiliate Site : A Website with lots of affiliate links and weak on content.

A website with too many affiliate links on and not enough content to offer the visitor anything unique or new, add more fresh and unique content to every page.

4: Selling Links : have you been offered £50 to place a post on your blog with some links in or put a HTML banner on your site.

There’s a  slight difference between selling links in every post and one HTML banner on your website, but you’re still breaking Googles T’s & C’s. If you can remove the link then remove it or if not just apply a “NoFollow” Meta Tag.

I hope this helps some of the newer SEO people that might read this and maybe others as well.

I’ve made a few slight changes to my own site so only time will tell if its to come back to life, coincidentally whilst this one got penalised I was already building another site almost identical in structure but selling other products from Amazon using the Amazon Associate program but there’s a lot more content on the pages so if this site gets hit then I’m almost certain that its going to be the over affiliation, that’s caused my sites to take a hit.