Panda 14th update.

[Squizzel]

I got hit on the 14th, search traffic when from 200 a day to basically 5-10 a day.

Anyone got any ideas what i got penalized for? And suggestions to remedy it?

Kinda sucks because i was starting to make some decent money, i really dont want to have to start over again. It feels like 3 months of hard work down the drain.

[Mr-AJ]

Wasting too much time on PAL can cause Panda penalties after the latest updates. That's just a rumor though!

[Lovina]

The site you are talking about, is this the site in your signature?
If so, I'm guess in this panda update Google reduced the value on links coming from comments and you do have a lot of them.

[Squizzel]

i have over 1k root domains, check in majestic.

I cant see how it can be related to links honestly, everyone in my niche has shitty links only. period.

[Sebastian]

Weren't you trying to game the system, or showing off about a "system" last month, something about spinning content and using article directories.

I told you to be careful - You always loose trying to game Google. Everyone may have shitty links, but that's not necessarily the affiliates making money. I can tell you the biggest affiliates on this forum do nothing but white hat SEO, and buy some links.

I think it's fine to build crap links if you really want them, but make sure to have links from a diversity of domains... and sources. A source could be comments, article directory, quality high PR links, etc... If your links all come from one source, although from a wide range of domains, you're going to ride the algorithm swings.

Get premium links and then you should be able to get the crap ones more safely. Although I never get anything but good links these days to be honest.

[parth84]

definitely!! agree with seb...good links and white hat SEO could make a real difference..

[superiorword]

No one does "white hat" seo in this industry. NO ONE.


Buying links is black hat according to google.

Creating mini sites for linking is black hat.

And several other "white hat" methods are actually black hat. It's all about being smart with your linking strategy, and thats the main difference between the successful and not successful affiliates.


White hat seo according to Google is "create excellent content so that people link to you". It is probably the gayest thing to do if you're trying to rank for high competition terms (that is, not buying any links, not creating mini sites etc. and just writing "excellent content" and waiting for people to give you free links lol)

[Matt Geer]

Buying links is black hat according to google.

That's not 100% true:

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results.

Source

While I understand that gambling is a tougher niche to compete in, I'm curious as to how many people have truly tried to build (buy, rent, guest posts, w/e) links with the intent of getting traffic from where those links are placed, as opposed to manipulating Google (and their experiences +/-). I've built (bought) links for some guys here and I would be surprised if these sites offered some, if any, direct/referral traffic at all.

[pokeraussie]

^ Yeah, Google suggests adding nofollow to links for advertising purposes.

The bit about creating mini sites for link building purposes as being "black hat" is not 100% true either.

[superiorword]

That's not 100% true:

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results.

And just below this they've written:


Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the <a> tag
Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file


Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such as excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank. If you see a site that is buying or selling links that pass PageRank, let us know. We'll use your information to improve our algorithmic detection of such links.


So they indeed categorize buying links as blackhat seo, and can penalize you for it