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Amazon Links destroyed my rankings, I removed them, will my site recover?
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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?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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