Several of my sites got hit by the "thin affiliate" penalty. Can they recover?

Within the last couple of months, I had several of my sites get knocked out of the top 10 due to what I am assuming is the "thin affiliate" penalty. Yes...I am one of those that made the mistake of creating sites using only plugins like ReviewAZON and WP Bestsellers without adding any content, and Google slapped my sites and put a big dent in my 4th quarter income in the process. I am adding content to them in an effort to get my ranking and traffic back, but am wondering if I am wasting my time. Has anyone's site been hit by the "thin affiliate" penalty, then added content and climbed back up to where it was before? If so, please let us know what plugins you were/are using, and how long it took to get back to your original position.

 

I hope someone can answer. It happened to me in the same way, but I did not use any plugins.

 

I'm not sure, but I think because they need to be manually reviewed before getting penalized they'll also need to be manually reviewed to be "un-penalized" as well. While the link below refers to sites that have been de-indexed you can try and see if that works. But how can you tell when your site has been slapped by the thin affiliate site penalty?

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66361

 

They do need to be manually reviewed to get the penalty removed. You have to submit a reconsideration request, via Google Webmaster Tools, stating what you have done to fix it etc. You don't get any kind of feedback from this so you don't know when they will review it, or even if they have reviewed it.

I have had a few of these penalties on some VERY profitable sites. I tried several times to get the penalty removed but never managed it. A couple of them still got traffic from other means, so I kept them going, but the others I had to just write off and let the domains expire.

Unfortunately I think you have a very, very slim chance of getting the penalty removed. Google just aren't interested in helping people out who create junk sites, with the wp autoblog plugins etc.

This is why I preach about the Thin Affiliate problem and always say create good quality sites with good, unique content.. there is nothing worse than having all your hard work and investment destroyed overnight.

I wrote more info about the thin affiliate penalty here: http://www.pickledshark.com/thin-affiliate-site/

 

You will rank about about position 50 for your best performing keywords. Your Google traffic will drop to virtually 0 overnight, but you will still rank highly for very very low traffic keywords and your own domain name etc.

 

I don't use plugins. Would a 3 to 5 page review site with unique content be classified as thin affiliate site?

 

I would say no, but it depends on how many other pages you have with non-unique content.

 

Thanks for the feedback. Hopefully I can get these sites back into the top 10 and generating income once I add the content.

@freshdevelopment: My sites seem to go through this cycle of being unranked, then reappearing back where they were for a few days, then disappearing again. Is this what happened to your sites?

 

Sorry to hear about the problems you have had with your sites.

I have heard about some of these plugins that you mentioned. I often get customers that ask me about these plugins because I am an Amazon Wordpress plugin developer as well as an owner/maker of Amazon affiliate sites (100+).

I cannot comment on your particular situation because I never make sites with auto-content, but I want to say that I don't have problems like this on the other side of the fence with making completely unique Amazon sites.

I'm fairly new on this forum, but I've been around another popular marketing forum for years. I don't have link posting rights here yet, but you can find out about my plugin through Google (called Product Style).

I have had trainees of mine that had problems like this and they were able to recover their rankings, but the amount of recovery time seemed to vary. If you're not back within 6 weeks, you may want to consider contacting Google to see if you have been hit with a penalty and need to submit for reconsideration.

 

This happened to me on some Wordpress sites where I had used the phpBay plugin. I ended up wiping the sites clean and started fresh without using any content generator plugins. So far one site has recovered and is back on page one of Google, the other site is still nowhere to be found. Both sites rank on page one of Yahoo and Bing though. Good luck getting your sites ranked again.

Chris

 

For those of you who are looking for an ad plugin that is not a content generator, try the Product Style Wordpress Plugin.

I am the maker of this plugin, but I use it on many of my own sites and it is being used on hundreds of other sites as well with no ill effects from any search engines. So, I thought it could be useful to anyone that has this problem or anyone that wants to avoid this problem.

 

I think if you change the content ASAP, you site may come back, because as far as i know, once a website gets rated as malicious or thin affiliate, they review it again and again..for different type of keywords.

Adding a small and unique article on each landing page can save you the trouble

 

This article http://www.pickledshark.com/thin-affiliate-site/ references a video in which the producer states "Don't Make Google Look Stupid". What if Google makes itself look stupid through no fault of yours?

Q...

 

Yeah, It happened to me. Key on domain name is ranked highly but other keywords were thrown away page 50+

 

It will be a hard road back. You may want to start again

 

Lots of people have talked about thin affiliates and big G is cracking down heavily on them. I recently got one of mine slammed last month. It's not worth it.

I hop you get yours back, I've abandoned mine

 

i've had sites slapped and some time after that they come back
after all G is not the only source of traffic right?

 

It sounds like back to the early rules, create content then optimize for SEO. Then create more.

 

Hey when I read your reply it was scary accurate far as my ranking position. I took the product descripts right from amazon and posted them on the home page. No original content.

Thanks for posting your insight. Gonna get some original content for this site.

 

The problem here is if you have already recieved the penalty, it doesn't get removed just by putting unique content on your site. You have to do a Google Reconsideration request and the success rate of that for me is 0%. In other words, I scrapped the domains that got this penalty.