There are few things more frustrating than working hard on your affiliate site for a couple of months only to see it suddenly disappear in the search engines seemingly overnight. Maybe telemarketing calls during dinner are more frustrating. But it’s up for debate.
I wrote a post last year trying to educate people on what exactly is going on when your site gets (or seemingly gets) a penalty in the search engines and what you can do about it. But with changes in the search engines even since then, and new results coming to light, it’s become necessary for me to expand on that.
I’m going to touch on how to avoid ever getting such a penalty in the first place (stuff we ALL need to know) and then how to come back from a slapping if you’ve had one.
But first we need to be reminded of the basics…
Google And New Websites
If you’re trying to make money by having your website rank in the search engines, you need to know this:
New websites are at a disadvantage in the search engines relative to older ones. Period.
Keep in mind that when I say old, I’m referring to how long the domain has been indexed in Google for. That’s it’s real age. Not how long you’ve owned the domain.
Further to that, new websites do weird things in the search engines. They’re indexed one day, gone the next. They’re in one position one day, 10 pages back the next day. Back and forth like this, sometimes for a month or more.
I know a lot of you know this. So why am I repeating it here?
Identifying A Google “Slap”
I repeat it because slaps mostly happen to new websites. And when your website is jumping around in the SEs anyway, it can be very hard to identify when your site has ACTUALLY been slapped, and when it’s just doing it’s normal thing before establishing a more consistent ranking.
Want to know the first thing to do when you think you’ve been slapped?
WAIT!
Don’t do anything crazy. Don’t panic.
Just as easily as it could be something, it could be nothing. Continue your daily work on the site and see what happens over the preceding couple of weeks.
Too quickly I see people questioning their entire SEO strategy, wondering which particular thing they did caused their site to get penalized. They’ll change up effective link building techniques that were working, lose faith in otherwise powerful techniques, or stop adding content to their site until they see what happens. No no’s.
If your site stops fluctuating in the search engines and stays permanently at a ranking of page 10 or more for a couple of weeks despite your ongoing link building and when it WAS previously ranking page 1 for your target keywords… chances are you’re in the “sandbox”.
But let’s back up for a second…
What we really want to do is avoid this ever happening. How do we do that?
I’m going to give you the 5 best ways.
The 5 Best Ways To Avoid A Slapping, Sandboxing, or Delisting
These are serious things, because losing months of your work is a serious problem. Let’s take it from the top:
1. Sacrifice a Keyword Targeted Domain In Favor Of An Aged One
Fact is that with a new domain name, you’re at significantly greater risk of getting penalized in the search engines. Old domains are safer.
I know we want to use keyword targeted domains to get quicker rankings – and there’s nothing wrong with that as a strategy – but if you’re talking about being in this game for the long term, and lowering your risk of a penalty while pursuing intelligently fast profits, old domains are your safest bet.
How old is old? I say 2 years at the minimum. And the older the better. I won’t go into strategies for buying old domains, but anyone who bought our Unstoppable Affiliate should be well versed in them.
You won’t get an exact match domain but as long as you end up with something mildly relevant to your broad niche, you’ll be doing great. Oh, AND you’ll have the opportunity to build out an authority site on it that promotes multiple products. Bonus!
If you CAN’T get an old domain for some reason, it doesn’t mean you’re asking for a slapping. There are still plenty of things you can do to keep on Google’s good side.
2. Speed Of Your Link Building
This has been a factor for new sites for years now and it’s still in effect. It’s the main exception to the rule that your site can’t incur a “penalty” for a backlink that’s built to it.
Put simply: If you’re building too many links too quickly, to your new site, it looks suspicious. Google sucks at being able to tell the quality of backlinks, but they’re perfectly well versed at telling the quantity of your backlinks and the velocity at which they’re growing.
9 times out of 10, if someone contacts me to say that their affiliate site seems to have been slapped, aggressive link building is the cause.
What’s aggressive? I’ve come to think that aggression relates to both quantity and quality (really meaning PR) of your links. I couldn’t prove that to you scientifically, but let’s call it an educated hunch.
Google thinks it’s weird when your site that’s been indexed for a week starts pulling all kinds of backlinks from all kinds of websites that are much older and more authoritative than it. Why wouldn’t that look weird?
That’s particularly the case when your new website isn’t adding much new content. Google: “What is so interesting about this site when it’s number of pages in the index isn’t growing and it’s only 2 weeks old?”
You can see where they’re coming from.
So what’s too aggressive. I used to go with less, but SEO expert and friend Matt Carter convinced me of the strategy of 10 links per day at MAXIMUM when your site is just starting out. That’s for the whole first month.
And easy on the high PR links too. If 10 of your 10 are high PR links, I’m going to be concerned for you. Sprinkle 1 or 2 high pr page links in there per day at the most.
You can boost that number from 10 to 15 or more in the second month, but you may find you don’t even need to. 10 links a day if you’re doing it EVERY day is plenty to rank for a whole lot of low competition keywords.
Besides that, as long as you’re keeping the backlinks to your money site as “quality” as possible, you should (not will… it is Google after all) avoid a slapping in those critical first few months.
3. Be Careful Of People Duplicating Your Content
This is a big one that’s only gotten bigger.
Sometimes, particularly with new websites, it’s hard for Google to tell where any given piece of content originated. As I’ve written before, Google will often judge the most authoritative website carrying a piece of content as the originator (that is the oldest with the most backlinks) of it.
And when your website is young, some crappy 2 year old spam blog that’s managed to stay in the index can scrape your content and suddenly YOU look like the thief to Google. Ridiculous, I know.
In light of this, here’s a simple thing you can do for each of your websites.
Let’s say once every two weeks, you go to your website, copy a paragraph from one of your articles (your most important money ones perhaps) and go paste it in the Google search bar and hit enter.
Do any other sites but yours appear in the results? If so, there could be trouble.
What you should do, is go back and rewrite that piece of content. Make edits, add bits in. It needn’t be a full rewrite, just enough to make that piece of content “unique” again. I know that’s a pain in the face, but it might just save your website from search engine destruction.
If you don’t find any pesky scrapers here, that’s great. Do the check again in two weeks. It might take an hour every two weeks to do this check (or you could outsource it for probably a few dollars… or write a piece of software to do it, if you’re so inclined!) but it will be an hour well invested in the safety of your income and your affiliate business.
This hasn’t happened to us, but I’ve heard from other marketers that they’ve noticed one of their sites take a hit in the engines, done as I’ve described here and changed up that piece of content, and had it successfully return to it’s original position in the search listings. This unique content stuff matters!
4. Watch Out For What’s “Above The Fold”
This one’s new as of… like a week ago. If you haven’t heard yet, take note!
Even in our UA course, we recommended using a sidebar banner for your affiliate offer, and getting one banner high up on your piece of content so it sits “above the fold”. We’re officially revising this in the wake of a change at Google this past week, where they’re aggressively downgrading sites with too much advertising “above the fold”.
In reality, I don’t think having the sidebar banner plus a small banner high on the content is going to trip the filter but… I also don’t want to test that out. We’re keeping our sidebar banner placement (at the very top of the sidebar) and removing that high banner in the content, in favor of the call to action at the bottom of the post, and possibly another banner in the middle of the piece of content (below the fold).
Anyhow, point being… if you want to avoid a Google slap this year, don’t throw too many ads in that space at the top of your website. Easy. Shouldn’t even cost you many click throughs.
5. Add Content Regularly
This is something we talked at length about in UA so I’ll sum it up quickly:
When your site is new, and you’re building your backlinks but not building content, that looks weird to Google. When your links are coming in somewhere relative to the amount of new content Google in indexing, that makes sense. You’re adding new content, doing more stuff, and it’s attracting more links. No red flags raised there.
Building a tonne of links to a “static” site is bad news to Google.
How much content should you add? Given that each new piece of content is an opportunity to get traffic from more keywords and make more money, the answer is: as much as you can! One a week is great, two a week is better, three a week is fantastic.
This is the second most popular reason I see people getting slapped with their new sites. Remember it, work on it.
6. Be !#$%@#$& Patient!
Ok so there’s one more.
This probably should have been number one, even though it’s a mental and not a technical point.
The underlying reason why anyone gets slapped in the search engines is because they’re being impatient with their SEO.
I’ve never heard about a real webmaster talk about getting slapped. I’ve never heard a serious blogger talk about it. Or a big ecommerce store. They probably don’t even know the word.
Getting slapped is a “make money online” problem. It’s for people like us.
And don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing you. We all need money and we need it now. We just need to surpress that need a tiiiiny bit if we want lasting success in the search engines and in online business.
Coming Back From A Slap
Once you’ve had a good slapping and you’re sure of it, deciding what to do next can be tricky.
A site can sit in the sandbox for months, and considering that a new site (that you do properly according to what we’ve discussed above) can rank quickly, it’s always a trade off of whether to keep fighting to try and get this site out, or just start a new site in that same niche (or a new one) and use the old sandboxed site for backlinks.
If the site you had slapped had big potential and you’d worked on it a LOT for multiple months and when it was ranking it was really making money… it’s worth sticking with it and reviving it. Revivals happen, they just take time.
What you do here is:
First, check all the points above and make adjustments where needed.
Second, continue your link building AS NORMAL. A site that’s trying to game the search engines will stop working and building links when it’s suddenly dropped from it’s position in the SERPS. A site that’s in it for the long term will continue as before. Google knows this and it’s watching.
Keep building links, keep adding content. Only adjust your link building if you deemed based on the above that you were being too aggressive.
IF you decide that the site isn’t worth rescuing, move on, register another domain and start again. Use the old website to link to your new one for a little extra juice in the beginning.
Frustrating but… lesson learned. Mistake that you won’t make again.
Bottom Line
Slaps are a fact of life for affiliate marketers. But they’re made to be avoided.
By doing things right and having a little patience, none of us should run into them.
Follow the instructions here and I wish you a slap free 2012!
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Andrew,
some excellent advice here, and above all your words on “patience” which is something all newbies need to learn well.
Wishing you well in this year of the Water Dragon!
Great advice. Giving Google what it wants (good content and natural backlinks), rather than trying to game them, is the best method.
These are good points. I’d add to that that one of your previous post on building authority sites was spot on. Plus…it’s never good to put all your eggs in the same basket nowadays. You can be an affiliate, but if you don’t have your own product, why not? Having your own products is one of the best ways to promote affiliate products in the backend. Though this can work for every single niche out there.
Franck
Great post. It’s funny you mention this now. I had an Amazon authority site ranking in the top 3 spots for my keyword, making nice money and it got Google slapped a week ago. I’ll keep these tips in mind for the future.
I recently had a site that recieved a penalty for all pages, knocking them all back to page 5. The site was 4 years old, had been ranking page 1 for a number of good terms for the last 2 years and already had a few thousand backlinks.
Prior to Christmas I thought I would try and boost some lower page one rankings and used a link building service to do this, within 3 weeks of using this service i got the penalty.
Now I can’t say for sure the link building service caused this but it was the only thing i did in the couple of months prior to the drop.
After checking back through the links they built (approx 400 in 4 weeks) they were all from duplicate content, even the titles only had about 4 variations.
I was always under the impression that links built on external sites couldn’t do too much harm, they would just be deemed useless and make no difference to ranking the page they are targeting but now i’mnot so sure.
Have you ever had an older site get slapped Andrew?
Hey Jon,
Not had an older site punished like that, no. It’s certainly a less common occurrence.
Note that this is different to a sandboxing that happens to new sites. This is more like a penalty where Google’s seen your site doing something it didn’t like and dropped it back a bit DESPITE it being old and otherwise authoritative.
Even though you started that kind of link building just prior to the drop, I hesitate to say that it’s the cause of the penalty. I mean it could well be, but if getting links from duplicated pieces of content to a 4 year old domain is going to cause that kind of penalty, well… a lot of other people and sites should have been punished for the same thing.
I would check your site for people who’ve duplicated it, and see if there are many. It could also be a panda thing – that update still taking place in small increments. It could also be the result of a manual review. How is your content quality? Do you know much about your time on site and bounce rate data?
I would use that kind of backlinks you used only for boosting anyway (since it still COULD be the issue) and focus on only high quality links to your site, then check for these things above as well and see if you can make a come back.
The thing about penalties like this is that they aren’t like a sandboxing that can last months. Often when the offending… whatever… is fixed and a few new links are built (to send spiders recrawling the site) the original ranking can be restored.
Good luck with it mate!
Andrew
Nice one Andrew, appreciate the reply.
This happened on the 25th November and from what I can see no major updates although i realise there are changes happening all the time. For the 3 months prior to the hit bounce rate was around 33% with an average time on site just short of 2 minutes, 4 pages per visit, as for checking my content for dupes i’m going to go through all that now! Determined to find out what is going on!
Thanks again for all your advice really, really helpful! Will keep you updated if it manages to bounce back.
Andrew,
Your post came right on time. I have a site being slapped from being in the top 7 for several keyword back to page 6 and 7 in Google. Age of this site is about 2 year.
It is worth to try to get it back and I will start doing all the things you advice to do right away. It must have been to many call to actions above the fold. my back linking strategy is pretty slow, so it could not be that.
Thanks for the great advice (as always)
Eddie
What fantastic advice. Thanks for making it freely available Andrew.
Dude that was an awesome post..and I am appreciative of the content that you provide for free. I’ve learned so much from your post and use the knowledge when I build my blogs. I have a new domain and am doing all the things you suggest above so I’m hoping that all is going to be well with the site. Thanks again
Andrew,
I LOVE the tip about duplicate content and the one about adverts above the fold. I couldn’t stop laughing about the “Be $#@$#%$% Patient” tip 
lol. Thanks again from the bottom of my heart. I really appreciate this!
I am a loyal customer and once again you have proved your sincerity in helping others by giving such valuable information for free. Others may have even put up a WSO for it
@Rich and @Sohail – Thanks a lot for the kind words. Really glad you got a lot out of this.
Hey Andrew.
I had my site slapped on 3rd of this month and I think I know why. I checked certain paragraphs of my site and found that 2 of my unique posts were copied word for word and posted on other more authortive sites. They were posted on these sites on 31/12 and two days later my site vanishes. I took your advice and have completely re written both posts. Like you said, patience is the key when this happens and I shall keep adding more unique content and minimal backlinks and hope for the best. Cheers
Adam
Hoped you’d get to read this Adam
Good luck with the comeback mate!
Good info here. There is no doubt that it is getting harder to rank especially with new domains. I am going to start using old domains again. I don’t really think exact match domains have the advantage they used to.
We have to start thinking more in terms of user experience and less about making money. The average user is turned off by a site that’s full of ads and because of that so is Google. Users feel like the site owner just wants their money and doesn’t give a rats ass about them. Google needs to provide users with the best possible experience or they will go to another search engine. If you have a lot of ads, even if they are Adsense, you are costing Google money and you will get slapped.
Hi Andrew. I took your advice on duplicate content and bingo… found “highly” similar content on a couple of other websites. Many lessons learned from your post today. Thanks for sharing again and again.
Thanks Andrew for putting this so clearly. It is always frustrating when your site gets bumped and even more so when you don’t know why. when you know why you have an opportunity to do something about it. Thanks again!
How do I know if my website is ranked on google search?
The question I always have is what’s preventing a website owner from building a ton of spammy links to a new competitor’s site? It just makes SEO so arbitrary that there are so many better ways of making money online these days and not be at he mercy of Google.
I’m sure glad I read this now and not later. I’m just starting a new site with a new domain and I was on my way to do a very aggressive backlinking campaign. Thank you for the great advice.
Thanks again Andrew for the great update information. If someone isn`t on your subscriber list or hasn`t got your products, they don`t know what their missing! Thank you for how you “keep on giving”.
I got you loud and clear. These insights are extraordinarily helpful.i don’t think i’ve been slapped, but I have had to reassess my original focus due to several events. You blogs, your candide comments, and your insights have been instrumental in me persisting. I am now starting two more sites. Thank you.
Very timely advice, thank you Andrew.
Andrew, that was an outstanding post, and you are totally spot-on. Things have gotten a whole lot more difficult in the past 9 months, especially the past 3 months. I have a terrific authority site where some of the pages are getting hammered despite the high quality content. I think a lot of us have gotten a little carried away with our link building, especially the automated variety. I am reevaluating my entire approach, and will probably end up doing a lot less blog postings, and bunch more social and 2.0 building. I would add to your sage advice to build a bunch of sites, and don’t get too invested in any particular one. Some will do well, and some will not do so well – for no apparent reason. In other words, diversify.
Andrew,
Fantastic post as usual. The part in particular that caught my eye was:
“And when your website is jumping around in the SEs anyway, it can be very hard to identify when your site has ACTUALLY been slapped, and when it’s just doing it’s normal thing before establishing a more consistent ranking.”
As someone who has been ‘following’ online for a number of years but is now just starting to take action – I’ve been a part of the trend to panic about all sorts of things. What I’ve noticed for me though, is that all of those mini-fears were actually excuses to keep from taking action in any meaningful way.
Google slap is just the one of many things that get people in a frenzy. I was doing the same until a mentor commented, “Before worrying about the latest google slap, how about getting a site to have slapped?” TOUCHE!
I have started taking action and it is marketers with integrity like yourself that have inspired me.
Keep up the great work.
Jeremy
It’s a bit of a two edged sword… On the one hand you might be really happy that you’re building links really well, and then “poof!” Your site is nowhere to be seen. At least when you build links slowly, Google may decide not to dance with you.
Good post Andrew. But I can’t shake the feeling that i’m always playing catch-up with Google. It used to be a whole lot easier to make money online. I’m still not completely sold on the authourity site model. I see the sense in it. But I’m exploring niches that purposely don’t fall into tht category. I’m working on micro-niche sites, with smaller, targeted traffic. I’m hoping the uniqueness of the product will drive me to the top of the rankings. Perhaps that makes me an authority on the abstract. I’ll let you know how I make out.
Andrew,
What a great post! Encouraging because I’ve been a bit nervous about link building for an offline client and you’ve given me some figures to work with, plus the fact that they’re a retail store.
Ray
Hi Andrew,
Great post – simple and sensible.
Just a comment on rewriting content, if you have Windows7 there is a free speech recognition package in it, you need to root around to find it. Once you have found it the only expense is a headphone set from Ebay if you don’t have one and there you are good to go for rewriting content and making it your own.
I have been using it for a year now and its as good as any commercial service.
Regards
Tank Johnson
Thanks Andrew for this valuable information. I have gone back to all my sites to ensure that I have followed your advice given above. I had one of my sites go from page 2 to position above 100, this happened about 2 weeks ago and of course I panicked but it turned out to be a google dance i think as it came back up after throwing a few blurbs and another article at it.
I have been looking at AM and reading so much about it over the last 3 months. It seems to me that a few years back, it was happy days indeed. Now it seems, the game has changed. I am not slightly interested in AM in todays world. The thought of waking up and fretting to see if my site has been “slapped” is not the way I want to live my life. Being at the mercy of Google sounds to me like a shithouse postion to be in. Why would I work so hard on a site to then constantly worry about it being slapped. Even if it’s an authority site, you are not safe. If Google thinks that AM is an unnecessary step in the sales funnel, what is the point? To me, working all day on a site that could be slammed in the SERPS at anytime seems ridiculous. Guys, none of your sites are safe. Google seems to change their mind all the time and you could get slammed at any given time. To have the rug pulled from beneath you doesn’t make for a great day. I think AM is too risky and it’s only getting harder. I admire you all for having the guts to be involved but I do think it’s a very long, hard road indeed.
Great post. Just started going through Unstoppable Affiliates so I can create some new niche sites. Sounds like doing the right thing never goes out of fashion and it’s the same on Google!
Rachel,
Although UA is a great tutorial, it’s kinda redundant. I’m pretty sure Andrew will agree. He has kinda explained this in his last few posts.
Why would I agree that UA is redundant? That’s absolutely not the case.
In UA you explain how to build mini sites. In your last few posts, you explain why mini sites are getting pulled. From the comments above and previous posts, it suggests that these sites are risky at best.
Quick question Andrew. For the duplicate content issue you mean pasting a paragraph in speech marks right so it’s looking for identical content? Otherwise there will be more results with similar words etc. True?
Awesome, Andrew! I’ve noticed this as well with my UA sites (I haven’t added that much content to them).
In your UA course, you recommended a certain number of posts and I followed that but with these recent algorithm changes, it is vital to add new content on a weekly basis. I’ll try to add more to my UA sites (I’ve got 2) and I’ll test out this theory and see if I’ll get back on Goog’s good side.
What I find hard to understand is – if Google is so smart, why can’t they read dates? Surely a sophisticated SE like Google could tell what date a piece of content was added?
Thanks for the post Andrew
Wendy