How to fix on-site Google penalty never experienced before

[stewart12]

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[williampatton]

Could you be a little more clear on what Google are telling you the problems with the pages are?

There are many reasons that they might be doing this but the quickest way for us to give an accurate response and help you solve it is telling us what Google told you about the pages.

Right off the top of my head I would suggest your 'thin' pages are more of a problem than your 'money' pages and no-follow might not be enough on the money pages. Firstly I would work on bulking up the content on both the thin and money page types. Noindex on the money pages might also be a good idea if the are overly clogged with affiliate links - but of course you probably want these indexed as they bring in revenue...

On-page my advice is simple - create improved content to pad out the pages. Off-site I would be looking for some quality backlinks from reputable 'people' sites (reddit, twitter) and pushing your content for social shares. I've found that certain pages (affiliate pages especially) perform slightly better in search when a few people have publiclly endorsed it on social media but nothing on-site beats the benefit of well displayed quality content.

If you could provide us with more info on what Google are telling you then I would be able to help more than just suggestions based on the assumptions you've come to (that the thin and money pages are likely to blame) of what the problems are

[stewart12]

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[williampatton]

Looking directly at that page I think that your reasoning is sound about adding an 'about', 'testimonials' and a 'review' section on each page. Strengthening those specific pages would do wonders in terms of the 'Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value' bullet in the quality guidelines. In addition - adding more value and text to the page would improve the pages landing potential and fill in a SEO oppertunity that is often overlooked in this kind of funnel page.

Another possible issue of note is - seen upon a simple 'site:domain.tld' search (and there are a lot of pages indexed from the site already so what effect are you noticing from the Google penalty?) - your title tags, again mentioned in the quality guidelines. Most include site title at the front and not much else after. Optimizing those tags is something else I would do and above all else the page title text is a valuable SEO commodity not to be missed out on. Make better use of those titles would actually be my first move now I think of it.

There are probably a few more things about the site that could be addressed but at the moment I shall need to leave a more thorough dig till tomorrow as I'm a little pushed for time and, I've just come to the realization that, the capabilities on an Android tablet for testing are seriously lacking.

Sorry we've not, as of yet, manage to narrow the problem down to a specific reason. Have you created a campaign for the site yet? A crawl might give some insights into other possible causes.

[stewart12]

Hey William, Thanks again. I've made a point to significantly increase the content on affiliate landing pages. We optimized title tags a few days ago so hopefully they're indexed very soon. Campaign turned up the following crawl diagnostics:

1. Too Many on-page links. (800 errors, many pages with 130-140 links)  We made many of the menu-links no-follow (specifically links to affiliate landing pages). I believe this will cut down the number of on-page links crawled by Google and should thus solve the problem to an extent?

2. Duplicate Page Titles (600 instances) - We've fixed these now and created original / descriptive page titles for each page.

3. Missing meta tag description (270 instances) - Added these.

4. Duplicate Page Content (160 instances) - We've fixed this as best we can I believe.

• Those were the main issues. They seem so simple. I believe we've now fixed these all to a good degree. Perhaps a culmination

This was the report from a crawl on December 17th and many of the changes were made since then, so just waiting for the new crawl to see if we've truly improved on these errors.

With your knowledge and experience would you be able to comment on how the sheer volume of error / warning instances above could effect our likelihood of receiving a penalty? For example is 800 errors/warnings for having too many on-page links something of severe concern?

Thanks.