Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
How to Maintain SEO Rankings After Redesigning a Website?
Hi everyone! Presently, our web developer team is redesigning our website(live football today). Right now, our website is ranking well on all our targeted keywords. Soon our new website are going to be live. I'm worried about our present ranking. Will it affect our current ranking? If yes, how can we maintain our SEO rankings? Thanks!
Affiliate Marketing | | fktos.tam.906n0 -
My affiliate links are being crawled by Google. Is this a bad thing? Also, should I add rel: nofollow to affiliate links?
Hi All, I have an issue on Google Search Console. It seems all my affiliate links are being crawled. Is this a bad thing? The reason I found out is that all but one link was flagged with a warming. It goes on to say that it was blocked by robots.txt. The strange thing is that I've not set any links to be blocked in robots.txt. Also, should affiliate links be nofollow? I'm asking because I was recently sent this article by Yoast on how to properly cloak my affiliate links without using a plugin. https://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/ In the method, they apply the nofollow and noindex rules to the links. I'm just a little confused on how to go about affiliate links the SEO friendly way.
Affiliate Marketing | | nomad_blogger0 -
Person using expired domain and its links to drive traffic
Hi, I know about people using expired domains to drive juice to their primary site but what about people using AN expired domain as their primary site (totally changing that site into a trashy affiliate-marketing vehicle)? The site I'm looking at is thegunzone.com. It has, according to Semrush, almost 38K links. It used to be a legit 17-year-old firearms hobby site, and this is what it originally looked like: http://web.archive.org/web/20120213184627/http://thegunzone.com:80/ Here is its last page before it closed and the domain purchased by the affiliate marketer: http://web.archive.org/web/20170315084035/http://www.thegunzone.com/ It closed around February of 2017, and some affiliate marketer bought it and all its backlinks. However, all those backlinks, which were previously to various articles, are now directed back to those articles (which don't exist anymore) but the homepage, including Wikipedia links. Here's an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_rifling At the bottom, in the 7th Reference, there's a link to an article called " "Learning About Shooting . . ." but if you click on the original link, it just goes to thegunzone.com homepage. Again, the site's totally different. And there are just thousands of such backlinks to former articles that don't exist anymore but are redirected to this schlocky site's homepage (and it's passing its juice through too). My question is this: this cannot be kosher with Google backlinking policies, right? Is this prevalent on the internet? Why hasn't thegunzone.com been found out and its rankings penalized yet? And how do I report him? I see tons of other sites using this basic strategy too on search results with various hunting keywords. (Disclosure: I do own a hunting/firearms blog, but I don't do any backlinking at all.) Any help would be sincerely appreciated.
Affiliate Marketing | | HandyWoman1 -
In what ways would an affiliate site be okay with Google?
I know Google has slammed affiliate sites hard. But affiliate marketing can be a real business and had an idea for one, but I would like to know if ALL affiliate sites are looked at as evil in Google's eyes, or if it's just those with thin and duplicate content in the product descriptions. I know they want brands to come up ahead of affiliates of that brand, and that makes sense. If I sold Acme Widgets products, Acme Widgets itself should come up ahead of my site. But what if the site sold widgets in general, with the term widgets not a branded keyword? If all product descriptions are unique and well-written content, on a site that is high quality, would it still be downgraded by Google just because there are affilate links in it? I guess overall the question could be boiled down to, are affiliate sites hit because they have horrible content or because they have links to affiliate programs in them?
Affiliate Marketing | | bizzer0 -
How many affiliate links is considered too many?
Hi, Let's say you have great reviews for 50 products and some of these products do have affiliate links on review pages. And then you have user scores and you come up with a top 20 product list sorted by user scores. Now if you have the list of top 20 products on one page and all these products have an affiliate link (with nofollow relation and a 301 redirect) on the same page with only a couple of images and a summary of the review linked to the review pages, would this still be considered as what Google calls a "bridge page"? Would it be better to still generate the top 20 list but rather link to review pages only? (to avoid too many affiliate links on one single page).
Affiliate Marketing | | Gamer070 -
Google Analytics Tracking Pixels for Third-Party sites???
Hello, Does anyone know if it is possible to track an event on a third party site and have it post back to your Google Analytics account? For example, I am sending traffic to a partners site and I want to know if that traffic I am sending them will hit a specific point of conversion (a sale) and I'm wondering if it possible to place a tracking pixel on their thankyou.html page that gets recorded in my google analytics?
Affiliate Marketing | | shawn810 -
Can a disapproved adwords ad affect SEO ranking?
Hi No not used adwords before as our onsite SEO was going well - with long tail terms ranking well to product detail pages. On Sunday we tried to set up an adwords ad as it wasgoing to be used for the forthcoming launch of a new product. - - PS Vita I think it is being classified as a bridge page although other price comparison sites such as kelkoo and pricerunner gocompare, travelsupermarket etc all seem to get through and have ads on Google? More interesting though is since the ad was disapproved my organic search results have disappeared? (which have all been white hat) Coincidence perhaps or something more sinister from Google?? One for you Randfish perhaps?
Affiliate Marketing | | ocelot0 -
How much link juice passes through urls with affiliate id's?
hi we can get a valuable link with the desired anchor text from a news site. the destination url would be something like www.site.com/product. but in order to track conversions, our sales team would like to add an affiliate id to the url, so that it would look like this: www.site.com/product?sess_affiliate=ta how much link juice would a link to this affiliate url pass? would we be shooting our wad by linking to the ?sess-URL instead of the original URL?
Affiliate Marketing | | zeepartner0