Confused by this SEO Problem

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MyOwnDemon

MyOwnDemon

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Jan 28, 2007
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www.sitestomp.com
I consider myself to be fairly good with SEO, but this has me absolutely scratching my head in confusion.


I have a wordpress site I built a while back for a video game that is being released in a couple months. I own (nameofgame).net. I was ranking for the name of the game in the SERPs between position 3-5 in google for a long time. I have a lot of strong backlinks from other video games sites thinking I'm the official site of the game (haha).

I always add new, unique content to the site whenever news is released about this game. I write all this content myself. Traffic was good, etc. In fact, every day it was growing as the game gets nearer to launch.

Well, Amazon just put the game on their site available for preorder. So, I grabbed the linking code and slapped it on my site and made a post about how the game is now available for preorder, you can order it by following this link, blah blah blah

The NEXT day Google took me completely off the map. I don't even rank in the first 5 pages of results (I stopped looking after that). I haven't gotten any traffic from G in about a week now.

This is pissing me off because I sent a good amount of clicks to the preorder link the day before G took decided I sucked. The WHOLE reason I built this site was to try and get amazon preorders/orders after I built up a decent userbase.

Now, would one little amazon link cause G to do this? I don't think it would, as I made no changes to the site's structure or anything like that. Just added this one 'preorder now' post.

I could try removing the link, but that defeats the whole purpose of why I built the site in the first place. I'm still getting traffic from other sources so removing the link would be stupid in general.

Just wondering if anyone else has ever added one affiliate link and then got removed from the SERPs?
 


It was steady for a couple months. I realize that's not a long time, but there's not a whole lot of competition for this term except from bigger video game sites who probably aren't trying to optimize their sites for this ONE game.
 
Was it a direct link, or did you cloak it? I've heard of something that hides shit from Google when it recognizes that the spider is crawling the site; it was posted somewhere around here. Although you did mention you don't think the affiliate link is the reason.

I do remember reading something about how Google frowns upon the affiliate industry. I think they're more interested in people directly selling products. However I could be mistaken.
 
I really doubt it's the affiliate link or half the internet wouldn't be indexed.

I'm wondering if the people who made the game sicked Google on you for trademark infringement?

Maybe your WP site was hacked? I heard about one site that was de-indexed due to embedded links from a WP hacker who buried invisible links all over the place.
 
It's not cloaked. I normally use php header redirects on other sites, but on this site I just copy and pasted the code. Maybe I should cloak it but I figured Amazon would have pretty high trust with Google.

@coglethorpe: Yeah, I checked it, it's clean. No hidden links.
 
MyOwnDemon said:
It was steady for a couple months. I realize that's not a long time, but there's not a whole lot of competition for this term except from bigger video game sites who probably aren't trying to optimize their sites for this ONE game.
Click to expand...

I seriously doubt it is the affiliate link, especially an amazon one. Without know the exact domain, I am going to speculate here, based on past experiences:

- Check your backlinks again, make sure someone else didn't point to your site from some spammy stuff (think negative seo)
- Has search volume for the term spiked? It could be if the domain got sandboxed as the volume for the game spiked.
- How long is domain registered out for?
 
I know this is probably obvious and you thought about it already but maybe the site is sandboxed. I know this usually only applies to a brand new site but it wouldn't surprise me. I highly doubt putting one aff link on your site would make it tank. Did you recently get a lot of links in a short amount of time?
 
I made a similar site to yours, but for an electronics item.

I began ranking for the product's name in the top 5 of Google and Yahoo very quickly, then after about a month I got totally dropped to the 100s in both engines (but MSN was ranking me number 1 so i wasn't completely dead).

Sounds like a case of getting thrown into the sandbox, like with mine... i'm now back ranking number 1, ahead of even the official website on Google. Yahoo i'm still not ranking anywhere, not sure why.

BTW I also use Amazon affiliate links, but have had them on since DAY ONE.
 
I bet it did have something to do with the pre-order release. Although what, exactly, I don't know. It may not be permanent.
 
Is your site still in the index? Does site:yourdomain.com returns your pages?

If you still have pages in the index, then you may have a penalty.

These days, I would do my best to cloak, scramble or encrypt affiliate links. One less 'footprint' for them to add to their tally on your site.

However, Google results are now in a state of 'everflux', so it's not unusual for a clean site to drop way down anyway.

I think they're trying to combat paid links. Some sites can now rank with 10 backlinks showing in their link:domain.com command. Still: one site I know of has 14 million backlinks in Yahoo, and is No. 1 for for a very competitive term.

Nice to know Google isn't omnipotent.
 
Yeah, site:mysitename.net returns my site and it appears to be almost fully indexed. It probably is a sandbox thing. Google even gave it a PR4 on the last update which even adds to the confusion.

Checking some backlinks I'm seeing a whole bunch of forum links coming in from chinese and russian gaming forums. Maybe G is viewing that as spammy? There are NO paid links and I even have links from some well known video game sites.

Wow, this is so frustrating. I'm just trying to make a few bucks on some preorders and either (1) Google is really throwing a wrench in my game, or (2) somebody didn't like me and is trying to do some bowling on my site.
 
I don't pretend to be any type of expert on seo, but I thought spammy incoming links don't matter. It's the spammy outgoing links that google doesn't like.

I always hear the argument that if they punished spammy incoming links then your competitors could bury your site in a minute. Oh wait.. hmm.. maybe that's exactly what happened??
 
The addition of the affiliate link probably bounced you to the sandbox. Feel free to PM me the URL and I'd be happy to look and see if there is anything else obvious.

But, that's the most likely case, google will put you back where you were (probably), however, I think they have some sort of filter that triggers when you add certain link types.

I always add cloaked links that go through a legit gateway site.
 
I added 1 noncloaked aff link to a very whitehat site and it got bounced out pretty good. This was a week ago. I think it was the link. I am still getting traffic but not as wide as before. I was getting tons of traffic to my main page for all topics. Now it is deeper traffic to individual pages.

Not sure though still testing.
 
^ Thanks for all the input so far guys.

I put a noncloaked aff banner for a video game offer on the page a few weeks ago and totally forgot that I had done that. So, I removed it earlier today.

I also removed the wordpress footer. It had like 5 links in it from the maker of the theme.

I am changing the site one thing at a time and trying to see if anything is helping so I can deduce what the problem is. When/If I figure it out, I'll post it here so anyone else whose having the same problem can fix it.

Still ranking in Yahoo and MSN. Just not G.
 
MyOwnDemon said:
I also removed the wordpress footer. It had like 5 links in it from the maker of the theme.
Click to expand...

Bad neighbourhood and G acted about it would be my guess. Your de-ranking and adding an affiliate link is probably just coincidence. Also, I wouldn`t frantically go changing your website, remove the links and you`ll be fine eventually.

cheers
 
Update:

After removal of the affiliate links, I went back to ranking #5 in google. Maybe they are cracking down on this shit.

Guess I'll be more careful with my cloaking in the future.
 
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