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There is nothing about adsense in particular, or creating sites with that as a model of monetisation that means it is spam. Yes - lots of spammy sites do use adsense or amazon affiliate. However so do lots of good sites and plenty of other things in between.  I would though agree that your focus on articles & backlinks does sound more like the sort of discussion I hear at that end of the market. We run a couple of mid-sized adsense sites and do pretty well out of the - enough to have regular face to face meet-ups with an Adsense account manager.  You can imagine that I wouldn't be too keen to walk in to Google's office to discuss those sites if they were spam! Increasing adsense earnings is complex. The obvious things can be counter productive in the long term.  For instance trying to push the click through rate through the ceiling on key landing pages seems like a no-brainer way to increase earnings.  Longer terms though that sends some questionable signals (both back to search quanlity and in terms of the ad quality) and you can seen both traffic and CPC decrease. What will work is going to differ from site to site.  One thing that is working well across the board is to serve the adverts through DFP (doubleclick for publishers) rather than directly with the usual adsense code. Using DFP not only makes is easier for advertisers to specifically target your site, but means that you can sell ads directly.  Adsense is an auction, so selling ads directly in fuels that auction and can help drive click prices up.  Direct selling also usually commands a far higher price - so we're quite keen on this! Using DFP also means that you can use other networks to compete against adsense. My other tip would be to try not to focus too much on the earnings per visit.  The logical end-point of that thinking it just to immediately bounce people out of the site by the quickest and highest paying means possible.  If you are getting your traffic from google then immediately sending them back out to Google your site has no value.  If you want to sustain the sites long term (which as sites are expensive and timeconsuming to build, you probably do), then you need to build on the site and keep adding value in to it.  Repeat visits is one of the best ways to measure if you are doing that well.

Eric Ward did a good Hangout last Friday and gave them the nod too.  the full 1hr 48min is at but but the short answer matches the answers above.  If it makes sense for your user, it makes sense for Google.  I think I hear Matt say that once or twice too. watch?v=a8oDC0Q-IV0

There are no shortcuts to getting quality links, that's what makes them so valuable. Some ways you can acquire quality links include: Writing guest blogs for the top blogs in your niche Holding giveaways & contests to attract links Creating amazing, shareable content Being newsworthy and getting coverage from newspapers and blogs Making donations to high authority organizations, charities, and student groups If you  need more ideas, here's a great list: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

I like the idea of sending affiliate links through a redirect on a subdomain because you can kill off all of those links at once by removing the redirects so they don't affect the final destination page should you need to clean up your link profile of page-rank-passing affiliate links. Whereas, if you had those links go straight to the destination page you'd have to ask the affiliates to remove each and every link, and/or use the disavow tool on them. I have heard of people sending those though a URL shortening service instead of a subdomain, which should work just as well since they are 301s. I'm not sure how much sway keywords in the redirecting URL have, but it isn't a bad idea to keep them contextual as you described above. That just seems to make sense anyway. Since the affiliate.subdomain URL is going to 301 redirect it won't have a canonical tag. You could put a self-referencing canonical tag on the final destination page if you wanted to. The number in the URL is fine. This seems like a good topic for discussion so I will leave it open for you. PS: My answers assume you know the risks of passing pagerank through affiliate links and are willing to take them.

Back at this, still looking.  Any help please?

You can mark the post as spam and ban the author from posting again in your page and/or report them. Check here: https://www.facebook.com/report http://www.facebook.com/help/263149623790594/ By the way, it's probably not a good idea to spam this forums. Good luck!

Question: Did Google notify you in the first place when they put the penalty on your site? If so, how? Did they post something in the WMT message board? Wolfgang

Heather, We didn't end up going with Catch Marketing; in fact, it was a predecessor of mine that originally posted this and our company did end up going with another company that does something quite similar.  I've always seen this as bad practice - doorway pages. One of the first things I did when I started here was get those pages taken down - it just seems way to risky for a company like ours (or any for that matter).  We have more than 60k products online, and to do something shady like this is going to end up doing more harm than good. Anyways, since we took those pages down within the month, I haven't seen any changes really, but I think there are also a lot of other things we need to fix to get things right again - ho-hum.

Hi Jasmine, Thanks for the good information. I have always suspected that the cookie was being dropped in some cases but that has been difficult for me to prove! Checking out Multi-Channel Funnels reports in Google Analytics has given me more confidence that that is the case but it is still not adding up exactly. Here is something interesting. If I add up all orders with Google affiliate ID's and all orders with a long-string referrer that originates from google.com/cse , google.com/aclk  or google.com/url I get my magic number of 31 conversions which matches what AdWords has. I believe I can pull a report from our database that would populate with just these parameters. If you have any other ideas though, I'd love to hear them!

Hi, I've setup 301 redirects on cookerreviews. Check one of the other domains, e.g. breadmachinereviews.

The total number of links is almost always going to be higher than the RDs.  This is because the domain is counted once (hence "unique") whereas there are often many links coming from that domain.  Consider your own site - your own site will provide links (these are called internal links) and you will have hundreds or thousands of links from your own site.  If you have a homepage link on the menu bar, that is creating one link on each page of your site. So the number of links is not very helpful to look at alone.  It may be useful to look at the ratio of total links to RDs, but that's a separate issue.  The more useful metric is RDs.  If I were you, I would pursue links from different sites so that you can build a portfolio of more RDs. It's not unusual to have 10-15 RDs for a new domain.  After 1 month I would be surprised, but seeing that after a few months would be normal.

I find lots of dupe content too. Instead of building 30 sites I would focus on one, filling it full of high quality, original, substantive content. Actually, I don't think that I would make a travel site like these because I don't have the resources to compete and the ability to produce fantastic content for cities around the world. Lots of people see the sites of an industry ranking well in the search results.  Then when they try to make their own site or a clients they discover that they can't rank.  That's because they have zero authority and no power. it is worth it or better stop this project and focus on 1 product oriented website ? That is what I would be doing. is affiliate marketing dead in 2013 now? AM has been really hard for several years unless you have a heavyweight site.  You can no longer toss up a site with grabbed content - or even original content and get traction in an industry as competitive as travel. or my writers heh... you gotta keep an eye on these guys.

Thanks so much for the responses, guys. You've reaffirmed my suspicions. Someone had suggested using a 301 but I believe that method could potentially interfere with the affiliate tracking.

Hi Myriam, I totally agree with you, is always good to have such good opinion from other experienced SEOs. I also think that you're right when trying to encourage someone in building a good website and invest on it, they'll be happier and the users too. My idea got out after seeing how much google is pushing their products into serps, I own a  portal which has many features but mainly lists different shops in categorized pages.It's quite frustrating to have the same rankings as last year but lower traffic due to  due to local listings and 7pack serps pushing my listing back and deep into the serp. I was both trying to optimize for broader keywords without locations which are not affected by local listings and also trying to find a spot inside the locals. I know that this may be a further question, but how are you guys recovering the lost traffic due to the serps giving every month less exposure to SEO results?

I attached a Graphic to this post so you can understand better. The Day I added and removed the amazon links fit perfectly when the rankings go down- and up again. Now what worries me and this is why I made this post: The rankings went down again just 2 days after "recovering" when I removed the links. Is this still the side-effect of the Amazon links? The site got removed and is returning a 404 error but still most pages in the google cache have a link to that "bad" page. Or do I have to worry about something else? an7tFBz.jpg

i doubt google could ever do anything about it because so many legit sites get 50%+ of their business from their affiliates Bit of an over-estimation, but 2 years ago I would have agreed that they wouldn't do it.  Today I'm less sure.

I'm taking this as comparing Adroll vs. Adwords as an advertiser... if you mean as a publisher, then ignore my answer. First, Adwords has all sorts of different display advertising, Adroll is all retargeting Advertising.  I prefer Adwords because it's completely self-service, and I can see all the data and statistics for my placements.  You can see a lot of stats in Adroll, but they don't display conversion stats in the interface for your specific placements.  Also, with Remarketing Lists in Google Analytics, I can get pin-point remarketing based on custom events and goals within Google Analytics.  You can duplicate a lot of this within Adroll, but it requires communicating everything with your reps. With Adroll you'll get some reps who will help you optimize your campaigns, and with Adwords, if you don't already have reps, you'll be on your own.  Adroll has a further reach than the Google Display Network, so your ads can reach other display networks, as well as Facebook. Where I work, we use both to maximize our reach!

just nofollow it and then you can link to any site you want without worrying about anything. Link anywhere you want and it won't harm your site if it's nofollowed.