Ok so once Google released their penguin update, my traffic has been cut by over half. What gives? So I read some general things that Google disliked, however to be honest, its kind of vague. How do I figure out what specifically it was that caused this, so I can fix? -Is it backlinks I built being devalued? -Some of the content on my website has affiliate links to amazon books, within context of the content -There are some pages on my site that I outsourced to create, and I think some of them may be creatively rewritten articles from other websites. Copyscape shows them as partially matching content from other sites. I would really like to get in there and fix this so I can get my traffic back, but I need to find out what is broken. I would like to prevent deleting pages, and just rewrite them if need be.
Honestly mate, I am seeing this everywhere. Genuine SEO's putting forward quality useful sites are getting slapped and other crappy sites are topping Google. You should read my latest article regarding this (link in sig).
This is probably the reason or a part of it: Some of the content on my website has affiliate links The Google updates are really impacting a lot of sites that are trying to make money.
Lapseo: Thanks for the point to the Penguin article, I'll work at that and try to see if I can utilize it. danasurvey: Do you know if anyone has documented this relationship to affiliate links and decrease in serps?
No problem joseph, pass on to others if you can. PS. Google have made it perfectly clear they do not like affiliates or affiliate websites, they haven;t made this formal but its obvious from their blog. Try masking affiliate links using wordpress (or similar) plugins