What’s a quality site to Google?
As we all know Google has updated their Algorithm again on the 11 April 2011.
Yet again a lot of my sites were smashed into oblivion.
So what I did was take some time to compare WHY my sites were hit and many other guys who built similar sites like mine were totally fine.
I’ll give you some examples of sites that were totally fine and I know that they followed the Affiloblueprint model.
http://www.flightsimulatorinfo.com/
If you looked at these sites you’ll notice one thing.
Well at least I did!
They did not contain many advertisements and only had at most 4 affiliate links a page.
I think this really makes a big difference, because I couldn’t understand why my sites were dropping into oblivion when the structure was pretty much the same.
Until it hit me.
Most of my sites had a panel that was above the fold dedicated to ads and affiliate links. Also, later on in the article I also had more affiliate links often 3 per article. Then if that wasn’t bad enough, I would have even more links at the bottom of the page. This would result in sometimes 7 or 8 links being on a single page.
I think that’s what really triggered their penalties.
Maybe I had too many sites looking like they were purely made for the purposes of making money.
So that’s another lesson that I learned the hard way.
Also, if you’re wondering if those examples sites I showed you make money, yes, I asked Mark Ling (who owns those sites) if he makes money out of them, and he tells me they bring him money on a weekly basis.
So that means, despite the fact that he did not plaster it with affiliate links, people still read the articles and eventually bought products from him!
So that dispels the myth that you need a lot of ads to make income from your site.
Right now, I’m going through my remaining sites that were not pummelled into the ground and fixing them from the ground up to increase their overall quality.
Hopefully this time they will be perceived to be a site that is of quality that Google likes and will not punish!
Hi Jackson,
Sorry to hear you got hit again with the second Panda update. I got hit with that one too.
What is really strange is that some sites saw an increase in ranking and traffic, while my older one’s seemed to get hit the hardest.
All of my sites have the same number and type of ads on them.
Personally, from what I’ve observed, it seems to be about the consistency of backlinks being built to the sites.
I reversed engineered the sites that seem to have weathered the storm and are sitting at position 1 for some competitive keywords. From what I can tell, you need to build lots of high PR backlinks by commenting on blogs or paying people to link to your site. Kind of depressing if you ask me…
Anyway, I’m still trying to make sense of what’s going on myself.
Take Care,
Clayton
What did you learn from this experience?
I think the quality of the content of my sites that I built a long time ago was a key factor. So now I”m making my sites higher quality to be slap proof. For example: http://howtoreduceweightfast.com/
That one is better in terms of quality of articles, themes and layout in general. So it should be much more to the liking of Google.
Hi Jackson,
I am sorry to hear about that. My personal preference has always been to Show Google what they like to see and hide what they don’t like to see. Now it might be true what you say that you will do fine with less links. One question do you have all your aff links as Nofollow? I hear a lot of discussion about this and some people prefer to have them as no follow.
Personally I do some CSS hacks its a bit tedious but that way I can have 100 links per page but in the eyes of google I have 0 links since its not recognized as a html link…. It is my only conclusion that Google in the end of the day hate affiliate sites. I mean they state clearly that “bridged” sites are more less banned in adwords. And paid traffic and SEO traffic is essentially the same it would be very strange if they had different rules for different type of traffic….
It might be realtive easy to compete in niches where you know your only competition is going to be Clickbank affiliates with the same (crappy affiliate links to google) affiliate links. But what if you go against other sites that are “none Clickbank” with your Clickbank affiliate links broadcasted to Google bots!!!
I don’t have my links as no follow, but they are redirected, so it shouldn’t be the issue.
I don’t think the hoplink is the issue, but rather the quality of the sites I created. My newer sites didn’t have their links cloaked and none of them were affected at all, so it’s kind of hard to say.