Advertising and negative impact on SEO

[dustin999]

On one of my sites, I've been trying to get the word out by contacting blogs and asking them to share my site with their readers.  This has resulted in some free publicity for my site, as well as quite a few paid reviews/sponsored posts.  Note, however, that I've never paid for links, just reviews of my site...

When I started this about 2 months ago, my site was a PR3 and getting fairly lowsy organic search traffic (i.e. 30-40 visits a day from Google).  Then a few days ago, my PR dropped to 1.  I didn't worry too much though, because my organic traffic was still around 30-40 visits a day.

Now today, I checked and I only had 1 visitor the entire day from Google.  Obviously I've been penalized.

My most important question is, what can I do?  Do I have an recourse, or do I need to just shut the domain down and move elsewhere?

Second, wtf is Google penalizing this?  I understand the argument against paid links, but should I not be allowed to advertise my site?  Apparently I can buy links all day long through Google and they'll happily take my money, but the minute I pay some poor blogger to write an article about my site to their audience, I get penalized?

Please help, I can't believe I just destroyed one of my sites like this!

[KeriMorgret]

I agree with the thin content assessment. Below is what I wrote before I read your comment a second time.

I'm looking at interior pages on the site, and my question is "if I were Google, what benefit do I get from including this site in the index?". What does this site offer that's not already on the web? I visited a few random pages. Several of the offers were expired, some as much as a couple of years ago. The product information is taken from another site, and is duplicated all across the web. The blog hasn't had a new post since January. There is very little to this site that is not from a data feed, from what I can tell. Why should Google include this site in their results, when other sites can offer more information?

On the technical side, don't include "all" in the robots meta tag, it's not an option (see http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html). I don't know if it's causing any problems, but it doesn't need to be there.

[dustin999]

FYI, to add some more to the discussion, I had a long talk with an SEO buddy of mine, and he has a theory on why my google traffic might have dropped.  Before, my site was a PR3, had been around for several years, but not getting much traffic, much publicity, etc.

Then I started this advertising campaign in early June.  Immediately we started getting a lot of links, so from Google's perspective, it looked like there was suddenly interest in the site.  Obviously, some of those links were sponsored posts, which Google possibly took note of.

However, if I look at webmastertools in Google, I noticed that Google is crawling a lot more pages.  This was probably because Google said "woah, something is going on here, this site is showing up on a lot of blogs all of the sudden" so it crawled like crazy.

However, on this particular site, I basically aggregate deals on women's products.  A lot of the content on each product page is pretty generic, like product titles and descriptions that are duplicate content from other sites.

Therefore, my buddy's theory is that Google took an interest in the site because of the sudden influx of links.  As a result, Google crawled deeper into the site (keep in mind we have 50-75k products, each product with its own landing page).  As it went deeper, it didn't like what it saw, because the content was "thin" i.e. lots of duplicate content with other sites, etc.

As a result, his theory is that Google decided to penalize the site.  So in other words, he doesn't think it's the sponsored posts and the lack of nofollow links, he thinks it's the increased attention on the site that caused Google to look closer.

Any thoughts from anyone else here on this?

[dustin999]

I haven't made any code changes or robots.txt changes, at least not yet.  The URL is:

http://www.bargainjill.com

This is a site that historically has gotten poor SEO, I just started focusing on it in the last month by asking for links/articles/reviews from other sites.

[KeriMorgret]

Hi Dustin,

Do you know if any code changes have been made? Maybe accidentally something modified the robots.txt and excluded most of your site? Has your organic traffic from Bing and Yahoo had a similar drop? Before getting the tin foil hat on too tight, check the robots.txt file and the code on your page and make sure something didn't go astray there.

Can you share your URL with us?

[dustin999]

That's what I heard from everyone too, don't rely on page rank when it dropped from 3 to 1.  That happened over a week ago, but my organic search results were still healthy.  Then last night I noticed the big drop down to only 1 organic search result from the standard 40-50 results I was getting from Google.

If I went back through all of the sponsored posts I've received and asked those site owners to add rel="nofollow" to all of the links to us--or at least the ones that disclosed that the post was sponsored/paid--do you think google would remove the penalty?  Do I need to do anything proactive with Google to make them reconsider?

[dustin999]

The site still shows up in google, but I've lost positioning for the few keywords I spot-checked, which coincides with the results I'm seeing from Google Analytics.

What should I do?  One idea I had was to go back to all of the sites that wrote paid reviews for us and disclosed it, and ask them to add rel="nofollow" to all of their links.  Assuming this is what penalized us, would Google re-evaluate and eventually remove the penalty if it saw that all of our sponsored posts had rel="nofollow" even if originally they didn't have nofollow attributes?

[seanmccauley]

Hi

I would wait another few days before confirming that you have been penalised, as this is unlikely. First check that nothing else has changed, especially your analytics tool? What are your actual organic results positions for your keywords? Do you have an adwords campaign, has that changed? Also, I wouldn't rely on page rank as a metric. Instead, use Seomoz DA and PA.

[JamesNorquay]

Paid reviews are pretty much the same as paid links, becuase you are paying for the content to be placed on a block with links.

The worst thing is if the person you purchased the paid review is listing the stuff on a public forum or public site. Then Google can easily just see the content and hit it hard.

In regards to making content that is not paid I advise to use Guest posts where you make content for free for a site.

You can try and make sections of the site on sub domains and see if they have any ranking, I would also advise to make sure then content is natural and unique.

Maby it is worth while also too type in site:yoursite.com into google to see if it is also still in the index, worst case senario is if Google has removed the site from the index.

My advice is to try a reconsideration request if that is the case.