How long will it take for Google to forgive us?

[footsteps]

Hi all,

The last few weeks we started working on several affiliate websites. All was fine, the number of pages indexed in Google increased, rankings increased, visitors increased but;

After two successful weeks Google noticed what we were doing and decided to crash our party.

What we did;

Create an affiliate website presenting shoes for ladies (15.000+ pages)
Create an affiliate website presenting brand shoes only (25.000+ pages)
Both sites were new domains and we linked them to each other.

Biggest boo boo's we think we have made;

• We didn't put a no follow on the affiliatelinks
• We linked the websites to each other causing google to spot 25K new links to a new domain.
• Stuffed the index with 40K new pages out of nothing
• Didn't exclude the correct parameters in webmastertools so all items got indexed a multiple times.

The above resulted in a drop of 95% of visitors and 3 weeks down the road we gained 10% from our low point. All boo boo's are corrected the last few day's and now we are wondering;

How long will it take for Google to forgive us? And are we correct in concluding we messed up big time?

Hope to hear your insight and let this story be a warning to others trying on this endeavour.

Kind regards,

Gerwin

[Bush_JSM]

Hi Gerwin,

I can't give timeframes but I had a client who had 100+ property sites interlinked (nothing to do with my advice!) and these guys starting to see the sites with no other links in their portfolio get smashed for rankings. One was pretty much de-indexed and was not ranking for its meta title. I sent a re-inclusion request via Google WM tools and after around 5 weeks the site started to rank again. It ranked worse after the drops but I think you'll find that the rankings and traffic were won by an artificially inflated link graph so if you get a re-inclusion request filed and all is forgiven it will be lower down in the SERPs as the site should not have been so high in the first place.

Thats what happened to me anyway but how G react depends on how many other non-reciprocal links you have. When you file a re-inclusion request grovel and come clean. Thats what I did and it seemed to work.

Thanks

Bush

[footsteps]

For now we are still "included' and get some nice traffic. But most results are on page 3 instead of the first page and 4 to 5 grouped together. Looks like some penalty tools are correct; they say we have a penalty of -30.

Google sitemap learns that daily more pages are indexed but the number of searched where they appear are almost non existent.