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Sorry to hear about that. If the problem is spammy back links, using disavow is a good start, but you need to wait for Google to recrawl them all. Also, make sure you use multiple tools to identify the back links, different back link checkers behave differently, and using several will make sure you identify the maximum number to disavow. Also, even disavow isn't going to address all the losses (SEO ranking is somewhat of a king of the hill game, getting knocked down will mean you still have to climb back up once you address the penalties). You'll want to reach out to as many of the spammy links and see if you can get them removed (frustrating, and many simply won't respond, but actually removing the links is the most effective version of disavowing them). You can also ask for a reconsideration if you feel the penalty was unfounded (see: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35843?hl=en). Finally, while it doesn't directly address the drop in rankings, you should consider investing in improving SEO signals. As mentioned by other searchbuzz, adding a blog that updates your page content regularly will help your SEO, as will updating your sitemap so that Googlebot doesn't think you are misleading it about the freshness of your content. You could also consider periodically going through your site and updating parts of it outside the blog to keep page freshness up a bit. Adding structured data will help search engines find the right content on your site, and right now you haven't added any (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fapplianceassistant.com%2F). Google PageSpeed Insights have a lot of suggestions for increasing page speed (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=applianceassistant.com). You may also want to consider moving to HTTPS, since you're dealing with a penalty and should be trying to maximize all the other SEO signals to compensate.

Unfortunately, getting hit with a penalty for algorithm changes not meant to specifically address your site (but to address those being extraordinarily abusive) doesn't have a quick fix. You just need to start practicing more sustainable SEO and mitigate the damage as best as possible.

Great question, and great answers from some of the other commenters. I've struggled with this question myself in building landing pages. The 20% rule is a good one, and makes sense, especially as Google gets better at semantic search and "keywords" become a bit less important in favor of query meaning. In a perfect world (one where search engines could understand queries the way your friend would when you told him what you searched for), if you cannot come up with 20% of a landing page that is entirely unique to that page, it's not something you should be building a landing page for. In the world we operate in, it's a nice guideline. My method for long tail landing page creation is: figure out what the head keyword that this long tail landing page is most related to (if you are trying to reuse the same value prop), and just rewrite every sentence. You should alter your word choice, sentence structure, and page organization (it's a nice opportunity to test those things as well, a long tail page that does unexpectedly well may give you some insight into a better converting format). At this point, I add the unique content. For keywords that aren't different enough to have true unique content, I'll generally write a section summarizing a few of the others all together, or add a different customer testimonial. To the commenter who mentioned that you can create unique content to search engines, but humans would laugh - a landing page for long tail keywords really shouldn't be something a customer can get to without coming to it from an external referrer. The root domain shouldn't link out to both domain.com/landing-page-head-kw and domain.com/landing-page-long-tail-kw.

As I understand it, you are asking about rendering the same content to two different domains that differ entirely in the tld (.au & .nz).

Based on my reading of Google webmaster guidelines, if the only difference is the domain and what country the visitors are from, you should not have any issues so long as you use rel-alternate-hreflang as you described. If you have multiple domains targeting the same users, just be sure to add a rel="canonical" tag.

Google's webmaster guidelines state:

"Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this might not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers."

source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en#3

Is this still happening? I crawled the URL you listed with tool an old friend built that extracts HTML/CSS elements and reads the page like a search engine would (he's worked on search engines professionally for years), and it extracted the correct title. As referenced above, Google's structred data tester is also showing no errors (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.freestyleaccounting.com%2Faccountancy-services%2Fsetting-up-a-limited-company-for-contracting-quick-start-guide%2F).  A screenshot of the query and result would be really helpful.

No problem! Affiliate marketing is a space that could really use something that shakes the current landscape up. I'd say nearly all affiliate marketers are great, and very helpful (and affiliates are too valuable a lead source to ignore either way), but some elements of the way the space works attracts less-than-aboveboard players. I've seen great value from affiliates, even when we were constantly fighting the coupon skimmers. One last thing that may or not be applicable - not all companies that use affiliates even offer a coupon, but affiliates will still advertise {{company}} coupons. My current company does this. This makes it a bit easier to keep an eye on the skimmers, since I just added a line to our policy stating that affiliates may not advertise coupons, whereas the only thing you can really do about skimmers when you do have a coupon is make sure they aren't bidding on branded search terms or using your trademark in their root or subdomain name.

For SEO purposes, either structure will work so long as it's clear where in the site navigation the page is, since it will just be making it easier for the site to be crawled. For optimizing for sales, the other commenters are right in that you are getting bogged down in things that aren't going to substantially impact customer behavior. Really the only thing you should be worried about with your URL in terms of conversion is whether you are using SHA-2 (people trying to come to an https:// version of your site will get a warning and no green reassurance in the address bar, and a red warning in the address bar if you aren't using SSL at all) and whether a visitor could look at the URL and have a good idea of what the content of that page is. Beyond that, you're optimizing at the extreme margins.

However, if you really do want to attempt to optimize your URLs to an extreme, it really depends on your site structure. If the entirety of the website is a store, then the /shop/ subdirectory is unnecessary. If you have a store as a part of your website, a subdirectory of /shop/ or /store/ or something like that would be helpful in indicating where in the site the URL is pointing. Similarly, having a product subdirectory makes sense if you have multiple categories of products (in your case, say you had both vitamins and paleo cooking ingredients, each with multiple SKUs within the product category). However, if your store only has 9 SKUs, all of which are vitamins, /products/vitamins is unnecessary for indicating where in the site you are (or, you could use /products/ to direct to a page listing all 9 SKUs, in which case the /products/keyword would ultimately turn into products/nameOfProduct).

If you have a site that has a store with multiple product categories all with multiple SKUs, you could consider /store/products/keyword as a format, although that starts to get a bit long. Have you considered using a store.website.com subdomain?

My URL process is: Is it the best indicator of where in the site navigation the visitor is? In most cases, this should mean it indicates that they are in a store, where in the stores navigation they are, and what item they are looking at (keyword). If that's true, then it's a good URL. Secondary concern is keeping the URL from being too long, aim for the most concise but clear indication of where in your sites navigation the user is. The final piece of the URL string (that indicates the specific page the visitor is on) is where you can add the keyword you care about.

Hi unikey,

I'm not 100% sure on negative SEO impact (would be interested to hear if the assumptions I've made from experience are accurate), but I previously worked for a company that did ~10% of their $75mm annual revenue from affiliates, and we primarily used ShareASale. We never saw a negative SEO impact from the affiliates (and we approved nearly all of them, at least initially), which I am assuming is because ShareASale affiliate links are all nofollow. Since ShareASale's value prop is massively expanding your reach to potential customers through their network, they should have been incentivized to make sure there is no SEO downside to leveraging their platform.

However, while this isn't negative SEO-related, I do have a decent amount of experience with affiliates, so you may be interested. You should be somewhat wary of affiliates, especially when the link you provide has a coupon attached. Some (not all, and definitely not the good ones) will just spin up tons of sites like cheap{{company}}coupons.com to try and capture some of the search traffic that is generated by people seeing a coupon code box on your checkout page. Since the way the affiliate model works is by giving a revshare to the affiliate for acquiring the customer, tracked by a browser cookie, they should only be receiving their cut if they sent the customer to you as the original referrer or sent someone to you who was not already planning on purchasing. Someone searching for {{company}} coupons isn't someone the affiliate sent you. The basic ShareASale policy forbids this, but you need to periodically run some searches for your brand + coupons and make sure no one is violating the policy. Luckily, this only really becomes an issue if you are seeing substantial success with affiliates, but I try and check in on this once a month or so.

For a better summary of the problem and a counterpoint (Don't worry too much about whether affiliate marketing is or isn't a scam, what matters if it works for you. These are just more eloquent summaries of the potential upsides and downsides of affiliates), see:

http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/12/the-big-ugly-affiliate-marketing-scam/

http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/15/affiliate-marketing-not-bad/