I'm not sure whether this is the right place for this post because it's more about not receiving any Google traffic anymore rather than SEO. Around mid-late October my Google traffic started to slow down. The last 2-3 weeks I've had none whatsoever. My site is listed in Google if I do a site:www.blahblah.com (about 200 pages). My index page was last cached on November 15th. If I do a search in Google on a keyword or short phrase that I know is on my site, I do usually find my site, but it's way down the list. I have a PR4 rating with my Google toolbar. My site is 7 years old and is now mostly affiliate links that connect directly to the merchant (no redirects or masking). I converted it over to an affiliate site earlier this year when the old content just wasn't pulling in sales any longer. It's mostly coupon offers and popular consumer products that I hand picked to promote. It's not thrown together nor pulling from a backend database of datafeeds like some of the larger sites of this type. I've tried to give it a personal touch. It did pretty good for a few months. Tons of Halloween related traffic. And then boom - around mid Oct., traffic from Google started tapering off. If I didn't have a PR rating or my pages were in the supplemental directory, I'd figure it was sandboxed. But since that isn't the case, and not to get ANY Google traffic at all is baffling me. Is there anyone at Google I can contact? Has anyone else seen anything like this?
The sandbox has nothing to do with a 7 year old site. Google is removing PR from a lot of "directory style" links pages. Google has shifted its attitude towards sites with affiliate links - the theory being that those sites are offering duplicate content and not selling anything of their own. A lot of these sites have been hit pretty hard in natural SERPS. I have a similar age site which went through this recently. The site is basically an informational site, but had some affiliate links so I could legally use their images. I solved the problem by creating false urls like: http ://www.yoursite.com/makeupdirectoryname/name-of-product-you-make-up.html You then use a 301 redirect in your htaccess file so when the madeup url is clicked, it redirects to the affiliate url. Looking at the page source, there is no way to tell the link is an affiliate link or even redirects out of your site. Then exclude the fake directory from your robots.txt file so the bots won't spider any url in that directory. You can never be 100% sure that any change you make is responsible for an increase or decrease in rankings because google is constantly tweaking its algorithm, but my top ten rankings for some very competitive keywords returned in about a week - and I believe masking the affiliate links was what did it.
Well, that was my next question because I couldn't think of anything else and mostly the only differnce between my site and larger sites like it. Thanks for the reply. Will htaccess redirect links that contain special characters like & and ? Most of my CJ/Linkshare/etc links have special characters. My site is on a Unix server. Also, if I do the masked redirect (that is what it is called?) do you think Google will start sending traffic again? Is there a penalty period of time?
Will htaccess redirect links that contain special characters like & and ? Most of my CJ/Linkshare/etc links have special characters. My site is on a Unix server. Yes. Also, if I do the masked redirect (that is what it is called?) do you think Google will start sending traffic again? Is there a penalty period of time? It isn't a "penalty" like hidden text, etc., because there is nothing wrong with affiliate links - it's just that google gives priority to non-affiliate sites (everything else being equal) in their quest for "quality results". My rankings returned in about 7 days, but that's going to depend on when google discovers/works the changes into their SERPS.
Uh oh! Could Yahoo be doing the same thing with affiliates (as you described) as Google? I'm seeing a drop off in traffic to this site from Yahoo as well. This is sooo annoying and just before the holiday season!
I found this in my htaccess file. What does it mean? I didn't add it. Could it be effecting my traffic from Google and Yahoo? RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://mywebsite.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://mywebsite.com$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mywebsite.com/.*$ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.mywebsite.com$ [NC] RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F,NC] Code (markup):
Another question ... I've changed my affiliate links to redirect via the htaccess file, but what about those links that are pulling an image from CJ/Linkshare/etc? Should I download the image to my site and pull it from there?
Did you track how people were getting to your site via Google? Which keywords did they search on? How do you rank on those keywords then (when you were getting a lot of traffic) vs. now? Perhaps your ranking dropped on the keyword(s) through which visitors search on to get to your site.