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

@House - I didn't mention any link numbers so how could you know they're too high?

@Andrew - Problem solved, I went to work eliminating some duplicate links in the footer and sidebar. The number was over 100 (114-134 depending on the site).

It seems the latest report didn't show "too many on-page links" during the last crawl since the apparent number went under 100.

Since the cross-referencing links to my other sites in each sidebar don't seem to be a factor any long I'm leaving them.

I have 8 niche websites for golf clubs. This was done to carve out tight niches for specific types of clubs then only broadens each club by type - i.e. better player, game improvement, max game improvement.

So far, for fairly young sites, <1 year, they are doing fairly well as I build content.

Running campaigns has alerted me to one problem - too many on-page links. And because I use Wordpress those links are on each page in the right sidebar and lead to the other sites. Even though visitors arrive via organic search in most cases they tend to eventually exit to one of the other sites or they click on a product (Ebay) and venture off to hopefully make a purchase.

Ex: Drivers site will have a picture link for each of the other 7 sites.

Question: If I have one stie (like a splash page) used as one link to that page listing all the sites with a brief explanation of each site will this cause visitors to bounce off because they will have one click, than the list and other clicks depending on what other club/site they would like to go to. The links all open in new windows.

This would cut down on the number of links per page of each site but will it cause too much work for visitors and cause them to leave?

Thank you so much for your assistance. On the plugin I'm writing the developers to see if there is a way to manipulate the code to appear in the area you recommend. Otherwise I may have to switch to something out of the Google "Authorship" toolbox.

I changed the redundancy with the links and left it to "Contributor to".

One last question on what you wrote:

I noticed your rel publisher links have "follow us on Facebook" as the link title. That probably wouldn't cause the issue, but I'd fix it anyway.

I've looked but I'm not sure where "follow us on Facebook" is appearing in "rel publisher" links. Is this in Google + or on my sites?

I appreciate all your advice on the rankings and authority. Thanks again.

Don

These sites are "Niche" golf sites so I whittled them down to specific clubs. I understand my competition covers all sites on one site but many golfers tend to look for a specific club then  either by a whole set or that one club they want - i.e. wedge, putter, hybrid, fairway, driver, etc.

I did some experimenting and sites aren't always coming up with the thumbnail images. It seems very random as to what URLs come up with the thumbnail or not. The Google+ pages and Facebook pages where I post a new review are coming up in SERPs. My FB pages automatically post to my corresponding twitter account.

Here's the Google + page related to Golf

Here's my Google + profile page

I suppose link juice was the wrong term, I'm really wondering if that thumbnail helps in the overall realm of SEO or I should not worry too much and move on the more important matters.

I've got 14 affiliate websites with plenty of original content on each.

When I set up Google + last year I of course had the page in my name and then went on to set up separate pages for each site. Actually one page is related to 8 different sites related to golf but broken down by club type.

I also have a Wordpress plugin which presents my author bio on my about page for each site. I've filled out all the pertinent information on each Google + page with unique data.

OK, when I write a review or blog topic and post it to Google + am I getting the rel = author juice from the sub pages as if I post it to my main profile page?

Posting to my Don Bistrow page vs. my golf page?

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.

It seems Disqus commenting system has grown and evolved so to make it easier to comment I've installed it on my 14 sites. I find moderation becomes much easier.

Is Disqus SEO friendly and a part of an SEO process? (I checked the topic and only found one's dated back to 2011).

Thanks,

Don