Amazon Links destroyed my rankings, I removed them, will my site recover?
-
Hello,
Last week I got the glorious idea to put amazon affiliate links on my website. I didn't put a rel=nofollow on them or deindex the pages they were on.
Precisely I put some reviews and 10 different amazon links on one page and I put that into my navigation so all inner pages were linking to that page.
When Google crawled my page again, I had a 60% traffic drop.
3 days later when I found out what caused this (amazon links) I completely removed the site containing those links and removed all links to that page from my site.
Now my rankings are still down, will my site recover from this or is it lost? And how long would you think it'll take?
-
I attached a Graphic to this post so you can understand better.
The Day I added and removed the amazon links fit perfectly when the rankings go down- and up again.
Now what worries me and this is why I made this post: The rankings went down again just 2 days after "recovering" when I removed the links.
Is this still the side-effect of the Amazon links? The site got removed and is returning a 404 error but still most pages in the google cache have a link to that "bad" page.
Or do I have to worry about something else?
-
Whilst it is likely that the links had a negative effect, it seems unlikely that they would have had such a quick effect. Links via forums aren't the most "natural" of links so I wouldn't advise sticking to that. When you are building links, ask yourself "do the links look natural?" Make sure they fit in with the content of the website and make sure that the website you are linking from has some authority (look when the page was last cached) because if it takes Google months to visit the website then it will be months until your link is cached.
-
It suddenly happened after those links were inserted so I think that was the reason, I didn't do much else during that time, could you name a few things that could cause such drops? I created some forum profiles with my site's link a few weeks ago but I doubt that this caused such a drop.
-
If you're positive that your drop in rankings were because of these links and you've since undid what you did with those links, you should begin to see your site climbing back up after google crawls your website again.
You can never be sure when Google will crawl your website again so you need to be patient. I would suggest possible updating some of your pages and resubmitting your sitemap to tip them off that they need to come back for another crawl.
I would also be 100% sure that the amazon links are what was killing your rankings before taking any actions. There are several other reasons why you would drop like that.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Affiliate marketing for our Amazon Products ??
Hi Guys. Can any recommend or is it possible to build an affiliate marketing programme to generate sales from our Amazon product pages rather the the traditional way of generating sales through your own website ? Can anyone advise ? Or recommend any companies ? Thanks Gareth
Affiliate Marketing | | GAZ090 -
International Re-sellers Scrapping My Site Should I be Worried?
We are a USA based company and we only sell direct to the US and Canada. However, we have partnered with other companies that are now distributing our products in other places like Australia and Mexico for example. These partners have scrapped our site and have used large chunks of our content to create a website for themselves on their intentional domains (ex.. .au and .mx). How concerned should I be about this? Should I reach out to them and require that they use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" or request the to stop? I have never had to deal with international SEO issues before, so any advice and direction would be appreciated!
Affiliate Marketing | | ChadC0 -
Affiliate program links
Hello, I've question regarding affiliate partner generated links.Company www.example.com has a affiliate program. Partner www.example2.com links to the company site with affiliate link www.example.com/?affid=xxxx in banner, article etc. As I understand these type of links could hurt our Company site, so I asked partners to use rel="nofollow" in all links where they link to us usign ?affid=xxxx in url. To be 100% sure that I did the right thing I decided to post here my question. Could these type of links hurt our Company site? Regards,
Affiliate Marketing | | juris_l
Juris0 -
'legitimate' link wheels
I was wondering what SEOMoz' thoughts are on the mega legitimate link wheel sites that are out there. TechMediaNet have been buying up massive news/media sites which arent really monetised (adsense) like http://www.space.com/ http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/ livescience.com and others and generating, admittedly good quality, curated content. Then seeding them with content with backlinks to their money site, toptenreviews.com which in essence is a review site with thousands of pages loaded with affiliate links no better than any of the other site out there. e.g. http://www.livescience.com/9755-bing.html due to the scale of what they're doing pretty much any keyword search i do with review in it (the last thing i wanted to purchase was a usb 3 hub) ends up with toptenreviews.com dominating the serps presumably due to the high PR the viral nature of the media sites are working with. Do you think Google will crack down on this, or do you think it's capitalism in action? TechMediaNet have invested millions in this project and just gotten another $33 million in funding recently.....
Affiliate Marketing | | idimmu0 -
What is the negative effect of getting affiliate links to your domain?
Are the negative effects of affiliate links to your domain bigger than the positive effects? Is it better to use a subdomain for your affiliate campaigns? (Because of linkprofile no follow links or time on page effects?) Thanks for responce!
Affiliate Marketing | | ltom0 -
Should "white label" sites have a unique template
I am planning on launching white label sites for my company. Obviously they will have unique/valuable content. Is it important for them to have unique IP addresses and/or design templates? If yes - why?
Affiliate Marketing | | theLotter0 -
Using follow links on client and resellers site
Hi, i have a backup software product that I sell to business. I would like to create a badge that says something like "powered by x backups". This would be an image with a href url pointing back to my company site. I would intend to give the client a discount if they were to place the small logo in the footer section of their website. I would also like to offer this to resellers. For example "Authorised reseller of x backups" badge that could be placed on the resellers website. I would like to do this for two reasons: To promote my company to the visitors of the clients website To build link juice Would this be effective in building quality links? It this type of link building allowed by google? If not, how strict are they? Is there any variation of my intended promotion strategy that would be more effective? Thanks
Affiliate Marketing | | blakadz0