Affiliate Niche Marketing and Google

[NicheGuy]

The affiliate niche marketing landscape is always changing. I have a number of sites that have worked well over the years and I always watch for changes that cause me to alter my business model.

However, and I can't prove this, many people put out the claim that Google in its "wisdom" punishes sites with affiliate links or too many affiliate links and that they specifically target eBay and Amazon. I use APIs for both and drive traffic to specific products to both sites. In addition I have some text links, two maximum per each piece of content and I only display 3 product items from the API. (phpBay and phpZon are the apps/plugins for Wordpress sites.)

I've stuck with original content, graphics and relevant videos, test my sites here at MOZ, made adjustments where necessary and never played Black Hat with my sites. They are thick not thin and always specifically relevant to the products and general theme.

With all that said, does Google punish these types of links? My traffic has steadily gone down since January 2013 for all sites. These sites are consistently updated each week with new content. The sidebars also contain a widget displaying 4 product links. Further, I rank very well with long-tail keywords, specifically keywords to specific brands and models as well as the my main site keywords. i.e. Best Antique Widgets, Best Golf Club Widgets, etc.

I would appreciate any help you can provide. Thanks,

Don

[gazzerman1]

Hey Don,

I have found a few serious issues with your sites. I looked at your profile page and saw a link to your Google plus page and that had a list of all your sites in your about -> Links section.

Let me start by saying you really have done a great job, the sites are high quality for content. I have been around for a long time and had many many sites over the years dating back to 1995, I have been through every algo change and tested out many different sites that have different strategies whilst working for web agencies.

You have a link at the bottom right hand corner that links to a master site that that is dofollow, they all do the same. That site then links back to all the other sites with dofollow links. This is seen as Google as a content/domain farm. Interlinking like this is a bad thing and you get penalties for it that do not show in web master tools. Trust me its happened to me and some of them never went away despite fixing the issues. Each site will bring the next one down just a touch, there used to be penalties -30 -50 -100 etc... they target your main keywords and generally you are left with long tail traffic and can never be the authority for the main keywords.

All the sites are on the same B class ip's and the whois data is all public and the same showing the same owner. If you have tons of authority and are a massive company these signals do not affect you however, your sites have little to know pagerank and authority and this all combined is dragging your sites down.

If I can see all that in 5 minutes then I am sure the robots can easily too.

As I said before your sites are in good shape content wise etc.. Maybe the look is also a bit cookie cutter and distinctive of affiliate sites. There are some great free css designs out there.

Remove all association with the sites.

John Mueller has said in the past that affiliate sites sometimes do a better job of selling a product in a niche environment so they do not target them and penalize like many people say they do.

Hope that helps?

[zoicaremus]

Hello Don,

Great advice you got from Gary Lee. I have similar experiences and I can also say that it matters a lot.

There are some additional things related to your website's backlink profile I would consider.

For example for the Glass Cottage website has a lot of links from /links page of other websites. There is no particular issue with this kind of links - excepting the fact that they, along with the links from your other websites make up for the majority of the backlinks. If a website grows naturally it's hard to believe it will get mentioned mostly on "/links" pages. It will be the other way around. It will be mentioned in "context" in many websites, and it will also pick up some /link pages. There is not much wrong with what you have, it's mostly what's missing.

And another thing that might be affecting your performance significantly:

In your backlink profile I found one "cloacked link" to your website. It was on some kind of designer's website. The link was not visible for the users, but it was visible for search engines. Along with a few hundred other links to hotels, games and other stuff. It was probably not your doing, it's a big chance it's some kind sabotage. This kind of links could make your sites enter some networks penalized by Google for bad linking practices. I would contact the website owners, tell them their site was hacked and ask to remove the links - or use disavow tool on it if no feedback received.

I would do a thorough analysis on each of your sites backlinks if I were you!

Good luck!

[gazzerman1]

Well spotted on that link Ramus

[NicheGuy]

I've dumped the links to GCI and also got rid of the image ad leading back to another similar site for just golf clubs in my sidebar and killed that site.

"Trust me its happened to me and some of them never went away despite fixing the issues."

So I should not expect to recover from my stupidity? If that's the case I may be finished. Terrific.

[NicheGuy]

Thanks for that advice - I picked up an article here discussing this issue and how to hunt the bad incoming links. I appreciate your help.

BTW - are you saying the link is on my Glass Cottage "About Page?" Not sure what I'm looking for.

[gazzerman1]

Oh no not at all, I had a few more things wrong on my sites back then, I just wanted you to be clear on what CAN happen.

Its horrible I know and like I said I have been there, but your sites are still ranking for stuff and I would have hope that you will benefit from those changes and worst case anyone looking at it manually at Google will not be able to pick holes at you for it now.

Some page rank on your sites with a few earned links will help you get back to where you want to be.

I am confident things will turn out for you if you make the right steps going forward. You have a great base.

[NicheGuy]

I just did some backlink checking and found Glass Cottage has been thoroughly scraped. How I'm getting an incoming link is beyond me, there is no link on the scraped page. He replicated the content and added a page full of ePay/ePN links. Nice, I don't see a recovery insight. He did this for nearly 1/3 the site.

[gazzerman1]

Send me a private message with the link to that site, i will take a look and see if there is anything you can do about it. Google is good at reacting to people like that.

[zoicaremus]

Hi Don,

I will send you more details in a PM. Good luck cleaning the links!

[NicheGuy]

Thank you, I look forward to seeing your information.

[zoicaremus]

I can't contact you by PM. There is some kind of error, your name does not pop up in autocomplete. Do you have "Accept Private Messages" setting enabled? I also tried on Linkedin.

[NicheGuy]

My MOZ PM is setup to accept message and notify me. I did accept you as a connection at LInkedIn.

Something is wrong with my PM, this weekend I sent a PM to Gary and never heard back so you may reach me through LinkedIn

[NicheGuy]

Since this discussion discussed problems with backlinks I want to refer to a great article and tutorial on locating unnatural links that could be damaging your site ranking and how to correct that.

Ultimate Guide to Google Penalty Removal