How to remove a thin site penalty

[GrumpyCarl]

Wondering if anyone could help out. A while back I made an affiliate store using wordpress and merchants products feeds. I didn't get found to adding any unique content to the site and, as was to be expected, I gained a penalty and my search traffic died.

A few months back I redesigned the store, still using merchant csv but now with 98%  unique content on each page. However, try as I may I still cannot get anywhere in the engines. The domain doesn't even rank for it's own name!! I have submitted reconsideration request but they have replied saying no penalty on the site.

The domain is www.digitalcatwalk.co.uk. While the domain isn't massively strong I would prefer not to have to start again as I feel it is a very good domain name.

Any advise would be most gratefully received.

Thanks

Carl

[Francisco_Meza]

If the Google Police are saying there is no penalty on the site, then it's not a manual penalty. To me it sounds like an algorithmic penalty. Go through your links in GWT and try to remove the spam links. I love SEOmoz's OSE to see links, but look at GWT instead because their index is bigger and that's what Google sees.

You need to remove the links that are penalizing your site. Read Ryan Kent's post on link penalty removals: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/identifying-link-penalties-in-2012

Weird, you have Magento as your index, but WordPress too?

[GrumpyCarl]

Hi

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I originally started to rebuild using Magento but swapped to Wordpress as it as quicker and easier. I see your thinking behind removing spam links but I'm convinced that the penalty is more for thin/duplicate  content than a dodgy link profile. All the product feeds are identical to merchants as it's an affiliate store and previously these were the only content on the site. There is now lots of unique content on there with these feeds but I think I am still being treated as if it were duplicate

[Francisco_Meza]

I am copying sentences from your site and putting them into Google and it looks like other websites have that sentence. So from my viewpoint, there looks to be some "unoriginal" content.

I don't really know how Google handles affiliate site. I know that they got blasted a few years ago for spamming. Your site is clearly an affiliate website.

Here is an example of what I see:

http://digitalcatwalk.co.uk/store/product/leopard-print-bra-straps/

http://www.debenhams.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/prod_10001_10001_152010420499_-1?CMP=AFC-AWIN-82640&awc=2194_1354467130_0e2080727e9680ee6ddb54e75501e459

You are copying this. If you have this too much thoughout your site, why should you rank? I just looked at one page, I'm sure Google can find many more with their crawlers.

[Andropenis_Australia]

Yes unoriginal content will get you penalised very quick. Even if it's your content, if another site steals it and they have more authority google will most likely penalise you for it. Great to be given the benefit of the doubt isn't it? So clear that up but contacting other webmasters to have them remove it, or simply rewrite your content. After you are happy, resubmit your sitemap and update it if necessary before you do.

[Debdulal]

Content of your website still bears some similarities with some external websites - http://digitalcatwalk.co.uk/store/product/lady-loose-coat/ - content of this page bears some similarities with the following URL - http://goarticles.com/article/Fashion-Advice-You-Shouldn-t-Pass-Up-On/6997768/

H 1 tag is wrongly implemented –

_All the internal pagination series have duplicate content:

http://digitalcatwalk.co.uk/category/968016/sandals-flat/2
http://digitalcatwalk.co.uk/category/968016/sandals-flat/148
http://digitalcatwalk.co.uk/category/968016/sandals-flat/147 `_

_Suggest removing the content from all pagination series. _

[GrumpyCarl]

Thanks for your help gents'. All the content on the site was meant to be 100% unique (I got someone in my company to create with the help of external suppliers). I checked samples and they seemed fine but it appears that all isn't what it first appeared.

I'll get the content replaced and get back to it.

Thanks