Affiliate Niche Marketing and Google

[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