6 replies to this topic

[knoxjeffrey]

Hi there,

 

I have a site [deleted] that is really struggling to get any impressions on Google search.  I have done a lot of work to help build the credibility of the site by building my social network and have over 15,000 followers on Facebook plus a reasonable number on Twitter and Google+.  When I post articles to my site I get a lot of likes, etc and looking at analytics people are spending time on the site to read the content.  I also redesigned the site to make it more mobile friendly, quicker and I have worked at on page optimization.

 

The only thing I can think of that is causing a problem is the fact that I promote affiliate links and this is giving me a penalty but the links are only ever for 1 company that I use myself.

 

I would really appreciate it if someone could give me some pointers to see what I am doing wrong.

 

Many thanks,

Jeff

Edited by qwerty, 14 March 2013 - 08:39 AM.
Removed domain name per forum rules

[Jill]

Are you doing any of these SEO Killers?

[knoxjeffrey]

Hi Jill,

 

I've had a look through that list and that shouldn't be an issue.  What may have been an issue was that I originally used Unique Article Wizard to get articles with links back to my site.  However, I spent a long time spinning each article on my site to make sure they would still make sense so the quality of the articles was good. However, Google may recognise these sites were my articles were being posted as being part of the UAW blog network and penalised me.  I don't do that any more and I submitted a reconsideration request to Google to see if this might have been an issue but they sent me a message back saying that there was no penalty:

 

"We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site's ranking in Google. There's no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team."

 

Another thing that I'm not sure is an issue is my affiliate links. For each link I do a 301 redirect mainly to tidy up the link address and to remove my id number.

 

Bing and Yahoo have started sending me some traffic through their search engines and as my site is only about 9 months old it is probably still quite young in the eyes of Google but I thought by now I would see some decent traffic especially as my site was ranking in Google in the beginning.

 

Thank you,

Jeff

[Jill]

Sounds like you may be mostly targeting highly competitive keyword phrases. If that's the case, branch out in to long tail keywords. Remove the spun articles from your site, and write your own ones that go above and beyond what's already out there. 

Google isn't going to bring you traffic if you're just doing what everyone else is doing. (I'm just guessing that's part of the problem.)

[knoxjeffrey]

The articles that are actually on my site are the original ones that were written by myself and not a rehash of other work. From each unique article on my site I then had another 2 versions made up to replace each sentence with another version and then for each of new versions I had individual words spun.  Then these spun versions were used on UAW. 

 

These are some examples of the keywords I've gone after which I thought were fairly long tail and I analysed them for competition to see if they were achievable. Do I need to go for even more terms in each phrase?

 

 

 

 

interval training for weight loss 

Edited by Jill, 15 March 2013 - 09:15 AM.
Removed list of keywords

[Jill]

From each unique article on my site I then had another 2 versions made up to replace each sentence with another version and then for each of new versions I had individual words spun.  Then these spun versions were used on UAW. 

 

That can only be hurting, not helping. 

[knoxjeffrey]

Thanks for the reply, I thought this might be the case but thought Google might have advised me when I contacted them. However, I have contacted UAW to get them to remove the articles.  They said they couldn't remove the articles but should be able to remove the links in the articles.  Might only be able to get rid of about 50% though they said but I guess I would just start using the Google disavow tool for the others that I can't get off.