Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thank you Mike, I'll try to do that then.

We have also cleaned some suspect backlinks from some old-time-directories that could have had some weight for our latest loss. Even though we had links there for a long time (several years), we have considered the fact that Google could have updated his algorithm to account for those bad links in some way and discount most of our rankings.

To give you an idea of the loss I am talking about, have a look at our SEO visibility on searchmetrics.com:

http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research/?se=1&url=www.virtualsheetmusic.com

From the end of June we have begun to have a big drop in traffic, we have lost around 30% traffic from Google. That could be due to some algorithm change either content side (Panda) or link profile side (Penguin or similar?).  We had some Panda related issues in the past, so that was the first possible cause came up to my mind, but since we had very big drops on some major keywords of ours for which we built suspect links in the past, I also thought about a possible Penguin related problem.

Thank you for your thoughts on this!

Yeah, from my back-link profile, it looks like my top affiliates are among my best referring sites from the DA stand point, that's why I am worried to disavow and 302 redirect all of them.

Another solution could be to 302 redirect the smallest ones (most of them) and keep the way they are (301 redirect) the best ones (a few of them) without risking to lose any juice from those high DA affiliates.

What would you think about this kind of solution?

Ok, thanks, and yes, We have already asked to all of our affiliates to add the rel="nofollow" tag, but most of them don't even bother to open our emails, and that's why I was thinking to a fast solution from our side t tackle this issue.

So, back to my original question, you would suggest doing what I was thinking already: either 302 redirect or redirect to a "intermediate" page disallowed inside the robots.txt all affiliate link requests without worrying of losing any possible (not-likely) juice value from those top affiliates of ours. Is that correct?

Thanks Mike, sorry, I forgot to let you know that we have our own in-house affiliate program, so that affiliate links look like:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/page/?aff=affiliate_id

And then, all requests to that kind of URLs get 301 redirected to:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/page/

We haven't had any manual penalty so far, but we are afraid all those affiliate links could have some weight on the algorithmic side of Penguin or similar. We have experienced a pretty heavy drop in rankings in the last 2 months, and we are considering everything.

Back to my original question, I am trying to understand what's the best route to take: disavow those links or keep them the way they have been for the past 10-15 years?

Thank you again.

Thank you Mike for your reply.

So, are you suggesting to redirect all affiliates links to my mentioned "intermediate" page, or not? How would you proceed to mitigate the risk from both sides (possible Google penalization and possible rankings degradation from those affiliate links)?

Thank you again very much!

Hello everyone.

Our e-commerce website virtualsheetmusic.com has several hundreds affiliate incoming links, and many of them are "follow" links. I thought to redirect all incoming affiliate links to a "intermediate" page excluded by the robots.txt file in order to avoid any possible "commercial links" penalty from Google, but I now face a dilemma... most of our best referral links are affiliate links, by excluding those links from our back link profile could give us a big hit in terms of rankings.

How would you solve this dilemma? What would you suggest doing in this sort of cases?

Oh wow, thank you David!

So, if I add the line:

Disallow: *?aff=

I could even get rid of the "intermediate" page I was talking about?

Hello everyone,

I have a pretty large e-commerce website and a bunch (about 1,000) affiliates using our in-house affiliate system we built several years ago (about 12 years ago?).

All our affiliates link to us as follows:

http://mywebsite.com/page/?aff=[aff_nickname]

Then our site parses the request, stores a cookie to track the user, then 301 redirects to the clean page URL below:

http://mywebsite.com/page/

Since 2013 we require all affiliates to link to us by using the rel="nofollow" tag to avoid any penalties, but I still see a lot of affiliate links not using the nofollow or old affiliates that have not updated their pages.

So... I was reading on this page from Google, that any possible "scheme" penalization can be fixed by using either the nofollow tag or by using an intermediate page listed on the robots.txt file:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

Do you think that could really be a reliable solution to avoid any possible penalization coming from affiliate links not using the "nofollow" tag? I have searched and read around the web but I couldn't find any real answer to my question.

Thanks in advance to anyone.

Best,

Fab.

I know this is a rather old thread, butI am wondering if anything is changed since this topic was discussed.

I see Google suggesting redirecting links to an intermediate page blocked by robots.txt to avoid schemes penalties:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

Ideas on that?

Thank you Everett! That makes sense. I appreciated your help!

I'll let you know if I'll have any more questions about all this, but I think for now I'll have to work to cleanup my back link profile first... thank you again.

Thank you Everett,

I see what you say. But, still I need to know if a rel="nofollow" is enough to get out of trouble, if any.

Thanks!

Thanks Everett for your reply.

About my first question, I am afraid I wasn't clear enough. I was asking about the links I have from those few websites I own that could appear like "paid" links.

For example, take the link to our site on the site below we also own which you already spotted above:

http://www.classicalforums.com/articles/Fourteenth_Century_Composer.html

Do you think that link could be easily "disavowed" by just adding the rel="nofollow" tag?

Also, may I ask you how did you find your above mentioned suspect links?

Thank you so much!

Also, another couple of questions:

1. Can adding rel="nofollow" to links we own enough? I'd like to keep those links for visitors.

2. How do you suggest tackling unnatural links: contacting the web owners asking to remove those links AND submitting those pages to Google via the disavowing tool right away, or just contacting the web owners hoping they'll remove the links?

Thank you for your help.

Thank you Everett for your reply and kind comment about my name, grazie!

With the only exception of the link on classicalforums.com (which we own, and that link has been there for almost 10 years now), we never paid for links and we never "endorsed" those other links you wrote about. I guess like those there are many others around, no idea who and why linked to us in such weird ways. Some of those links looks like have been out there for a long time, and we have never been penalized by Penguin, only by Panda back in 2011... but then we recovered by Panda by tackling and fixing all our duplicate page issues.

In any case, I'll definitively do some research on our back-link profile, but how would you decide when a link should be disavowed or not?

Patrick, I have tried the Panguin Tool you suggested, and it looks like we had a drop in traffic after the last Mobile update of May 1st, but our website is mobile friendly, why should we have been penalized because of that?

I am eager to know your thoughts on that. Thanks!

That's what I thought, I wanted just to have confirmation about that.

Thanks!

Hello everyone.

Here is my question: Until 4 weeks ago we used to have just around 2,000 product/pages on Google shopping of our product pages, then we added over 40,000 more items/pages to it, and our Google natural search rankings dropped on most of our long-tail keywords pointing to the same product pages.

Do you think that's just coincidence or could the number of products/pages on Google shopping affect natural search results?

Thank you Patrick for your reply.

Yes, here is what we have already done and keep doing regularly:

1. Competitor research: We are perfectly aligned with our top competitors, and we would deserve the 5-10 spot in search results. Actually most of the top ranked pages are crappy websites with pages plenty of ads and pretty much the same (messy) contents, it is surprising we have been penalized compared to those ugly pages.

2. SEO Audit: We perform that monthly and we have no special technical issues right now besides some thin content among our product pages that we are trying to improve continuously since 2011.

What we have NOT done is a backlink quality audit, and what you suggest doing (and the tool you are suggesting) is something we can definitively look into right now.

What really puzzles me why that page has dropped so much (or completely  removed, I can't find it!) compared with all other top pages of ours that haven't changed. The only logical explanation that now comes to my mind, after reading your posting, is that some kind bad back link pointing to that page has caused this issue... any more thoughts?

Hello here.

Our website, virtualsheetmusic.com, is pretty popular in the sheet music realm, and we used to rank on the first page for the keyword "violin sheet music" until a few weeks ago with our violin dedicated page:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Violin.html

But a couple of weeks ago we dropped to over the 5th page on Google (I can't even find us!) and I have no idea why. Most of our top ranking pages are still there though. This never happened before, after 17 years on the web.

Do you have any idea why that could have happened?

Yes, everything looks good, Webmaster Tools gave me the expected results with the following directives:

allow: /directory/$

disallow: /directory/*

Which allows this URL:

_http://www.mysite.com/directory/_

But doesn't allow the following one:

http://www.mysite.com/directory/sub-directory2/...

This page also gives an update similar to mine:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156449?hl=en

I think I am good! Thanks