I wanted to wait a little while longer to make this follow up post about my progress with the Google filter my affiliate site has been suffering from. I’d have liked to gather a lot more data before declaring the process I’ve been through a success. However, I’m moving house on Friday and going home to the UK the following Tuesday, so if I don’t make this post now it might never happen!!
OK, so for those of you that don’t know about the issues you can catch up here, here and here on the Google filter fun I’ve been having with my site.
To Cut A Long Story Short - It’s Working!
I’ve just spent the most boring 4 weeks of my life visiting each and every page of my site and reducing the mentions of product brand names and other key search terms. I was starting to think it was all for nothing as there wasn’t a lot of improvement. Paranoia and stress are the companions of the Google filtered affiliate! This week, I have really started to see the benefit of those changes. In my previous post I was starting to see a few pages popping back into the index. This few pages have turned into several, and this increases every day. Basically I’m now seeing a lot of the pages I altered right at the start of this process returning to the index.
What Have I Learned
- Unlike the duplicate content filter, the over optimisation filter takes a few weeks to be lifted. Whether this is because of any time penalty Google applies to your site (which Matt Cutts has more or less said can apply in certain scenarios) or is simply reflective of the time it takes Google to spider and re-evaluate your site content - I don’t know. I read somewhere that when there has been a filter such as this applied to your site, it will be re-calculated the next time Google decides how much optimisation is too much. If you have a filter like this on your site, I would say allow 6 to 8 weeks for your changes to be taken into account.
- This is an algorithmic filter, not a manual penalty.
- This filter was in relation to on page factors rather than off page factors such as link building.
My site has now already returned to getting roughly 30% of its traffic from organic sources. This was the proportion I was getting before the initial problems manifested late in May. This is terribly exciting because the majority of the affected pages have not yet returned. Hopefully what this means is that my site will be better and stronger than ever because of the revisions I have made.
A Side Effect of This Process Was..
That I realised the cross linkage between a lot of the pages on my site was really poor. I had written over 200 product based articles to compliment the main sections of the site. For the last 3 months not one of them has been generating traffic. I realised this wasn’t big bad Google, but the fact that the previous / next links within the article categories hadn’t been working for a while. This means a lot of them have been de-indexed and those that remain are linked to from perhaps only one page on the site. I implemented improved cross linkage and a sitemap on the blog, so I hope that means further growth is still to come when Google re-includes them.
Anyhoo…
The whole point of this post was - those changes I’ve described in all my posts did the trick. I’ve gotten out of Google jail and am back on the SEO highway.
This has been a very positive learning process for me. It is very important to me that I get a significant proportion of my traffic from organic sources to protect my income from the ever increasing competitiveness in the PPC arena and all those other margin squeezing factors affecting the industry today.
Thanks to everyone who has commented or sent me a message, they all really helped me focus on what the issue was.
Woo hoo!!!!! Getting married, moving house, and escaping from a Google Filter in the same month? What a charmed life I lead 
August 27th, 2008 at 10:54 am
great stuff Kirsty - glad you’re on the way up again:) Think GG is taking ‘on page’ factors a darn site more serious now, which, thank heavens, is what I’ve mainly concentrated on over the years (also known as can’t be arsed with all the hassle of link building campaigns)- and we seem to have hit ‘pay dirt’ a few weeks ago, when some very lucrative terms hit that No1 position
August 27th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Glad you got is sorted, I had my site indexed after deleting a few spammy posts and de-keywording a lot of others.
It started to do ok, then I did some RSS scraping (legit) and killed it with dupe content lol … that should clear shortly
August 27th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Hi Elaine - thanks, your comments to me via PM really helped. I too have seen the site ranking for more generic terms since the issue started to resolve itself. Probably due to a technique similar to your “waffling”. I’ll be focusing more on that in future also.
Jez - glad you too are getting out of Google jail. Hurahh!!
September 1st, 2008 at 10:27 am
Kirsty, good news & thanks as ever for publishing, I have realised I have a few pages that could do with some attention too. One in particular is bugging me, it’s 15th in serps for a nice phrase, as far as I can see those above it are no better and many are worse! Well it’s good to have a target, here goes ….
September 3rd, 2008 at 10:24 am
Hi Kirsty,
It’s very interesting that Google where penalizing you for over optimization. I am having a similar problem with some of my sites.
Basically I started on a campaign of generating inlinks to 3 websites, all done legitimately and mainly by article marketing. I have had some success but then noticed that Google suddenly dropped the websites down in its organic listings. One website has gone from 1 to 23!
Am I being penalized for having a sudden influx of backlinks? Has this happened to any one else?
September 3rd, 2008 at 11:15 am
Hi James, rapid inbound link growth can indeed trip a Google filter. How many did you get? What anchor text was being used?
It will be important for you to analyse and definitively establish this is the cause. This is because the only way out is to get those backlinks removed and pop in a reinclusion request.
If you’re not ranking for your site name, and you should be… its a pretty solid sign of trouble from a Google-ward direction.
September 3rd, 2008 at 11:45 am
Hi Kirsty, I received 20-30 new inlinks from article marketing and social bookmarking over a 2 day period. Is that enough to trigger a filter?
To find the increase in inlinks I use Yahoo Site Explorer. Is it safe to say that if Yahoo is recognising the inlinks then Google is as well. I ask this because when I do a search on Google using ‘link:http://wwww.xxxxxx etc…’ it does not show up any of the new inlinks.
Finally (!) the websites I am most concerned about have only dropped down 3-5 places. Is that enough to be a result of a Google filter or it is just that my competition is doing better?
Thanks for all your great advice on this post and your blog.
September 4th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Hi James, I don’t *think* that what you describe is enough to trigger a penalty. I also don’t think an inbound link penalty is only a 3 to 4 place drop - it’s usually much bigger!
Perhaps this is just the natural ebb and flow of the SERPS at play. I don’t think you have a penalty.
September 4th, 2008 at 9:43 am
Oh, I best add that you should vary your anchor text on incoming links to ensure the link growth looks more natural!
September 4th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
The thing about inbound links is not established, a lot of people believe it is possible to “Google Bowl” competitors with crappy links, others say it its just a part of Matt Cutts FUD campaign.
TBH I am not sure… initially I did not believe in it, then I came around to the idea… but now I am back to being a non believer…. largely after seeing a site profit from 3000 spam links gathered overnight.
Regardless of whether it can really be used as a negative SEO technique… 30 links wont do anything… but if you are using these methods to link, vary content and anchor text, otherwise only 1 of your 30 articles will hold in the main index.