Why can I no longer find my site with searches?

I recently added an affiliate link to my homepage. Ranked a steady #7 prior to adding the link now I'm bouncing all over the place.

I have one question. Would you consider a homepage swap of links to be affiliate links?

Is it bad to swap homepage links?

 

ok we established what you don't think it is , care to catalsyse the witch hunt for the real culprit, i have seen my listings disappear from adding either content or longtail affiliate links to every page, well idoubt its adding new original content...

errrm no iwouldnt class that as affili link, i added omg ads with a href longtail urls.

 

I lost my rankings (top 10 for many keywords) immediately after I purchased a link on a high PR directory. I've never ran into problem before. Anyone else see this happen before?

 

hmm just bought one of those as well, but only a week ago , so mines not directly that

 

I purchased mine last week as well. However, this directory gets crawled quite frequently, so I'm assuming Google has already spidered through the page where my link sits.

 

think its time to wait, ive seen 2 of pages out of the sup index, when checking site: thats not happened since end of Jan begin of Feb, plus all results i find that they say they are sups, arnt , i can't keep up.

 

I'm a little puzzled because I dont have any ads or affiliate links on my site, and no content has changed.

I hoping Google hasn't penalized my site for purchasing a link.

 

looks like its just a shakeup for you itl settle, one link cant destroy all that work its unethical imo

 

Hope you are right! Will wait and see...

 

im sure i am, otherwise im in the same boat as you, after my original problems clear up

 

guys, i just checked google datacenters. some of them have my site appeared on its SERPs. some haven't. now im confused why.

 

This seems to be affecting many sites. Both of mine have disappeared. Whats funny is that a webpage with an article I wrote linking to my site now sits in the position where my site was a few days ago Let's hope things change very soon...

 

I added links, in january, made some money in Feb., then my traffic dropped off, way off.

Cheers

 

Same here.

But the number of changes I made in Jan-Feb are far too diverse for me to guess which ones tripped off the filter, or penalty, or whatever it is.

Text-link-ads, link-vault, adding a blog, DP co-op...

Anyway, the weirdest thing I saw was that my second highest referrer today was a googlepages site I created that only contains a link to my homepage. It must rank well for something, but I don't know how to track it, and the interface is a nightmare.

 

I think I should write a deep analysis of what I experienced. The sites are of the same niche and owned by me.

Domain Registration date:
Site1: 14-feb-2006
Site2: 25-feb-2006
Site3: 03-apr-2006

Hosting Dedicated Server:

Site1: Static IP
Site2: Shared IP (Till end of Jan 2007 moved to Static IP)
Site3: Shared IP (Till end of Jan 2007 moved to Static IP)


3 Sites all related to same industry divided into 3 categories and analysis based on the same competitive keyword.

Search volume is based on Overture Inventory

January 2007
Site1: Ranking No.3 (Searches 33000+)
Site2: Ranking No.4 (Searches 33000+)
Site3: Ranking No.8 (Searches 33000+)

Affiliates Links
Site1: Yes
Site2: Yes
Site3: Yes

Text-Link-Ads
Site1: Yes
Site2: Yes
Site3: Yes

Link-Vault (Not on the site but I used my Link-Vault to build Links on the sites)

February 2007 till 17th February
Site1: Ranking No.20 (Searches 33000+)
Site2: Gone (Searches 33000+)
Site3: Ranking No.3-5 shuffling positions (Searches 33000+)

Affiliates Links
Site1: Yes
Site2: Yes
Site3: No (Removed the Link to add Site1 Link so I can monetize the traffic as Site1 Drop)

Text-Link-Ads
Site1: Yes
Site2: Yes
Site3: Yes

17th February 2007
Site1: Came back to No.3
Site2: Gone
Site3: Ranked No.4

20th February 2007 till date
Same results as before 17th February 2007
Site1: Ranking No.20 (Searches 33000+)
Site2: Gone (Searches 33000+)
Site3: Ranking No.3-5 shuffling positions (Searches 33000+)


I hope someone else share the same knowledge so we can have some analysis and came up with an idea to keep the affiliate links or not.

 

Holy crap, Soulhealer...

Thanks, I wish I kept records like that.

One thing missing: shared hosting, VPS, dedicated server?

Thanks,
flag

edit: my site, well, is on a shared server, and I built it from nowhere to top twenty for about fifteen search terms, then on one day it dropped off the radar - 950'ed fo all terms. The next day it came back with a vengeance, my strongest day (maybe ever) for Google traffic, all terms top five, the big ones #2-#3. One day later, oblivion.

I'll edit this post tomorrow with an image of my traffic - the peaks and valleys are definitely instructive. It's like G is testing my site.

 

Thats the kinda things that have happened to me, plus doing a search for my ecxact domain shows it on the 3rd page...;(

 

As I've been tracking my drop beginning the start of February, these are the steps it went through:

1) drop in SERPs for main keyword, went from 1st page to about 5th page in beginning of Feb
2) mid-to-late Feb it disappeared from SERPs for main keyword and was on third-fifth page for search of exact domain
3) this week it disappeared from google for search of exact domain

A site command shows my disclaimer and search page but not my home page. I remember this happening when I first built the site because I thought it was weird my disclaimer page was showing up in a search but my home page was not. Looking in Google Sitemaps it says my homepage is still indexed.

The site appears not banned because you'd think it would get banned all at once and my adsense would get shut down but some pages are still indexed and it has a strong PR4 still. I wonder if they are "relearning" my site? Weird stuff.

More info to chew on: I added an affiliate link in December, text-link-ads in January, lots of unique content from a new columnist starting in November, and bought lots of high quality, high PR, relevant links over the last 3 months. I still rank first page in Yahoo and MSN for my keyword.

 

It doesn't sound like I'm experiencing the same as you as my site went from page 1 to page 10 on 1st Feb for our key term - using Google Analytics we can clearly see traffic drop 50% literally overnight.

The strange thing for us is that we are still #1 for other keywords in our industry,

Just to give more info for anyone collating:

• We've never had reciprocal links
• We've never bought a link
• Approx 5 out of 2000+ pages have had Affiliate links for over 6 months

 

hmmm still no conclusive evidence, somewhat annoying