Booted By Panda

Well, it had to happen.

My affiliate marketing site that was just starting to take off, which was on the first page for at least half the 30 keywords I was aiming for and which was starting to create a regular $200 a month (actually in a good month it would earn $200 a week) has been dropkicked into touch by Google.

And fair enough too.

This was a site that I built using techniques taught in a course and using promotions that were incredibly ‘automatic’. I wrote and spun and submitted until I was blue in the face, then I outsourced someone else to do it for me!

Even though the writing quality was good, the pages and posts were all properly SEO’d and I had a site with more than 30 articles on it, the whole site went against the terms and guidelines of site quality that Google has made public. I knew that and also knew that I was on borrowed time. I figured that if I was a reviewer I would drop my site like a hotcake – and so it has happened.

To be honest  have been fortunate to get away with it for so long 

For the record, this is not a site that is scammy or unethical, in fact is is probably one of the better ‘quality’ affiliate marketing sites that you will ever see. BUT (and all affiliate marketers listen up here) it is also a site whose focus is definitely on the sale of a product and not providing good, in depth and fresh information to the reader – my bad.

It has not been de-indexed, just pushed to position 25+ for all the keywords except one, even so, traffic has dropped from 2600 a month to less than 1500 – I expect it to drop further.

I felt weird about building a site based on keywords, not information and should have stuck with my first gut instinct, to build a site that was different and which covered the topic from all bases. So the reader would get to see my site as a one-stop information source on the topic I was writing about instead of one which was obviously after the click through to the sales page.

Because I didn’t follow my gut there is now 2 years worth of work down the tubes.

My business, my decision, totally my fault.

I did a post earlier about the ethics of SEO and these Google changes are just confirming my thoughts from back then. If you are using and abusing SEO then your site will suffer eventually. Your readers are also a lot more savvy now than you have been taught and many can spot an affiliate site from three pages away.

Anyone who is still using tactics like mass article submission, building sites based around 30 variations of the same ‘buying’ keyword and generally building a site where the main objective is to get people to go to another sales page to buy a product needs to smarten their act up because the clock is ticking.

These are tactics taught in many IM courses and I have to believe that they simply do not work now.  I have altered my course reviews above to reflect this.

On the up-side – I now get to focus on what I want to rather than battling with the lure of the $ I was getting from being an affiliate

See ya

Rach

ps – if you are wondering whether article marketing is dead and what the answer is I’ve got a post coming later that’ll let you in on a couple of secrets

(…… gosh, that sounded really cheesy eh?)

OK, I’ve been researching and looking around and article marketing is not dead – but you do have to take it back to basics….. I’ll let you know more next time!

R

(pic courtesy of http://www.moejackson.com/category/movie-reviews?page=1)

• Tweet
• "&title=""">