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

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

Thank you, I look forward to seeing your information.

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.

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.

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.

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

Thank you so much Alex it worked perfect - and thanks for the huge homework assignment, I have 13 sites to attend to now.

Best Wishes,

Don

I use AuthorSure Wordpress plugin and it conforms to rel=author and rel=publisher in the settings.

Testing my sites has shown it works.

My campaigns are telling me I have some duplicate content.

I know the reason but not sure how to correct it. Example site here: Bikers Blog is a "static page" referencing each actual "blog post" I write. This site is somewhat orphaned and about to be reconstituted. I have a number of other sites with a similar problem.

I'm not sure how to structure the "page" so it only shows a summary of the blog post on the page not the whole post. Permalinks is set as "/%postname%/"

I've posted on Wordpress.org with no answer. Since this is an SEO issue I thought maybe someone with WP experience could chime in.

Thanks,

Don

An interesting aspect of Disqus is you can monetize it. In addition, it provides a short list of topics from your site and "around the web" below the comments.

I have received traffic from Disqus to my variety of sites and some has earned a few pennies. It's the traffic that interests me.

I use AuthorSure Wordpress plugin and it conforms to rel=author and rel=publisher in the settings.

Testing my sites has shown it works.