I had a website that was using Wordpress + Wprobot to pump out 15-20 amazon.com posts a day, along with articles. This site made 350 EUR on forst 20 days with adsense and $25-$30 a day with amazon.com until google gave me a whats called "-50" penalty, which basiclly means no more traffic from google, your posts will appear on the 50+ page of google search and give you 0 traffic. I bought this amazon wordpress plugin called WPZonbuilder from http://www.wpzonbuilder.com/. Ihad a few sites already with wordpress incuding www.spikeblog.com and http://tvgossip.net and 2 others in my arsenal. All of which now have the -50 google penalty and i get 0 traffic.With 4 sites making nearly 100 posts per hour( 1,000-1,500 per day) i got a few thousand of indexed posts, a few thousand visitors per day. Up until the penalty i was making $75 per day on the last 2 days and would have gone to $150 a day. I was making this money by a method called "thin affiliate". I had never heard about "thin affiliate" until i google it and found this site: http://www.pickledshark.com/thin-affiliate-site/. Google argues that your site must offer something to the user apart from posts affiliate links to sites. They argue that why does the user have to go to your affiliate site and when they can go directly to amazon.com??? So i got a -50 penalty for being a thin affiliate. It lasted for 11 days and made almost $600. I was utterly upset after getting the penalty because what i was doing was 100% right to everyone but the Big G, which at the end of the day is your boss and you must obey him/her. Google will never ban your adsense account or ban your website from google. They will only ban a site if they're link exchanging farms,etc. Only the -50 penalty applies to "thin affiliate". A few tips to not get caught: 1. Don't use webmaster tools, analytics or put adsense in your blogs. Use adbrite or other ppc networks.
Sorry to hear you got penalised but at least you made some money before they did. I actually wrote that blog post you mentioned and have been talking about this issue here in the forums for a long time. You can try things to avoid google like not using webmaster tools, analytics etc. (which I think is good advice as I had 5 or 6 sites penalised once a few years ago, and they were all on the same analytics account) but you will always be at risk of getting spotted. Any work you put into your sites could be taken away overnight. I don't know if Google use a manual review in this situation (I suspect so, after the site is flagged by automatic reasons) but you must also consider the footprint of a plugin like WPZonbuilder. Regardless the only thing you can do is create good quality websites. You can't hope to beat Google and if you do, it won't be for long as you have found out. Don't think you can outsmart Google as they spend $Billions on perfecting their search engine and catching spam...
Some of my sites using auto-post and have never get band. The different is I only do auto post about the related articles and I do not see any reason big G will penalty such the information site. I'd recommend if you want to use auto-blog you should mix them, like 80% article and 20% affiliate. Santacruz
I think same thing happen to one of my blogs while ago. Suddenly all traffic stopped. Then I started adding posts without affiliate links and then after few months started getting traffic back from Google.
Did you submit a reconsideration request to Google for this? I have had a couple of domains penalised and I never managed to get it removed not matter what i tried...
The key is you must add value. Think about it from google's perspective. Auto-blogs of affiliate links only ...why WOULD they give you traffic? If you haven't built links or added any value at all why wouldn't they go with the site the people are likely looking for anyway...amazon? But adding value is not hard even in auto-blogging. How you combine the items, providing a tight niche that is well mixed between affiliates, articles and other items. That adds value. Additionally, if you blast anything 100 times per hour anyone is going to get ticked off at that. You could set that up, post a post an hour making 50 cents a day and doing it over and over with no issues.
Sorry to know that, you were doing pretty good! Hope you moved on already and you're making more than you were before.
I don't mean to be a troll but I'm happy as $hit that Google is cracking down on useless sites and rewarding those who provide unique content.
I'm just nervous Google is going to see any site with affiliate links as a spam site. I have a review site for internet marketing products. And after every review I have an affiliate link incase they want to check out the product themselves or if they don't care about my review and just want to go to the product page. Most of the product's I review are terrible products. That's the whole reason for the site. Most are bad, but helping people find the good ones. But because most of the products I talk about are crap products, I'm nervous Google will just blindly stamp my site as bad. Ugh. Sometimes companies can be too big.
Don't worry. His sites have tons of products bashed together, with words from Amazon that aren't connected and there is no other text.
To build sites like this the trick is not to make the site look like a autoblog. Don't post 100 post's an hour, this is not natural and looks like spam. Don't have affiliate links on every post you make. Use about 20% (more if possible) of original content
well I have autoblogs running over six months without any penalties and getting paid by adsense but I gather information and pool it together on similar topics. My sites are easy to navigate and many people link to them.