The first three points on this little graph are three days when my site ranked 4th in Google. I was getting around 35 visitors per day. Then I climbed to 2nd and my traffic jumped to 130 per day. Finally I got to number 1 and my traffic just about doubled to 260.

I’ve got a few decent posts on this blog I think like the one about getting reindexed in Google but as no one has wanted to link to my site, I’m not going to rank very highly for anything but a few long tail searches. I know I could rank better if I put the effort in but it’s not much fun and and I don’t get anything out of it except a few more comments (the joy of getting comments on here is the only reason I write anything at all on here really). So good content (that people who publish online will be interested in) + effort in contacting those people = good search rank.

Start by looking for reasons why you could have been given a penalty. If your site has any of the following, you need to get rid of them:

• With the exception of meta tags and alt tags, does your site include text which is there for search engines to see and not for people to read?
• Is your site made up of mostly content taken from other websites?
• Does your site contain anything which may cause harm to a visitor’s computer such as viruses?
• Have you been buying, selling or exchanging links to improve your rank?

If not, the most likely reason you were penalised is that you you’ve been classed as a thin affiliate (as I was).

Are you a Thin Affiliate?

A thin affiliate site is one which appears to offer little value to its visitors. The only people that will benefit from them are their owners. That means it has adverts but not useful information. The text on the site is mainly there to convince people to buy a product or to appear in search results. If your sites simply points a user to a shop elsewhere on the Internet, Google thinks they might as well miss out the middleman and go straight to the shop. Sites like this are also likely to use black/grey hat tricks to gain higher search engine rankings.

How to Stop being a Thin Affiliate

To get Google’s respect back you’re going to have to put real work into showing your site is useful. Ask yourself if a user would have a reason to come to your site rather than go directly to any site you are affiliated with? If not you need to change your site so there are reasons. Here are some examples;

• Review products in an unbiased manner. Don’t overhype the one you are trying to sell. Why not give genuine reviews of products stating the benefits and flaws of each. You can provide an affiliate link to each of the products. Google doesn’t mind affiliate links, just as long as they aren’t the sole purpose of the site. How long would it take to write a few good reviews? Is it worth taking that time to get your site ranking well again?
• A price comparison chart requires little time to research but can provide a good reason for someone to come to your site; it saves them having to hunt around for the best price.
• Collect news and give your own opinion on it. The easiest way to get news on a particular subject is to use Google News. If you’re promoting the latest LG TV, type “lg” into Google News and see what stories involving LG are happening. Read it, write up about it in your own words and provide your opinion.
• Go to forums related to your website and see what everyone is talking about, then write an article on the subject. You’re not writing a sales pitch here, you’re trying to be informative.

It just takes a bit of creativity and time to come up with something useful to your visitors. Once you’ve given some purpose to your site and removed elements which exist only to influence search engines, it’s time to get on your knees and beg Google to let you back on their index.

Making a Google Reconsideration Request

Create an account for or sign into Google Webmaster Tools. If you haven’t already, you’ll need to register your penalised site with them. Now double check you’ve understood everything by reading through this and the webmaster guidelines.

Finally, go to the reconsideration page and tell Google all about what you’ve been through. It’s a good idea to be detailed and show you’ve put a lot of work into turning the site around. Below you can see the reconsideration request I sent to them which worked for me and you’re welcome to use it as a template:

Hi,
Over a month ago I noticed my site had been deindexed. I guess the reason was that it was classed as a thin affiliate. Since then I’ve been completely reworking the website to offer visitors something useful and unique. It is almost an entirely new website. Here are the changes I’ve made:

Removed all image affiliate links. [Actually I had added one back in before they reviewed it, so I was worried that might cause mistrust but they didn’t seem to mind]

Removed almost all text affiliate links.

There are now only a few remaining affiliate links. These are in context and the links would be there even if they were not affiliate ones.

Much of the old content which seemed less useful to visitors has been removed.

Main navigation is now more meaningful to users (the heading of each page is now also the anchor text).

Lots of new unique content has been written and images included, you can get an overview of the sort of information by reading the titles of the recent posts. I will point out a few examples of particularly useful information for visitors below:

You can see here [url of a forum not run by me] that lots of people are requesting information on reliability of retailers. My site aims to give people that information by pulling data from various web resources (and linking to them so users can validate what I’m saying). This is demonstrated best here [url]

Here [url] you can see a short review of some the best software for [product] along with images and links to download them (which aren’t as easy to find through Google as you’d expect so it’s useful).

The site will not return to being a thin affiliate. I am much happier with the new classier looking, more useful website. If traffic returns to the site I intend to carry out more consumer research at my own expense in order to aid my visitors in finding quality products.

7 Days after sending Google the reconsideration request I got a message sent to my webmaster tools account. It gave no details other than to say the site had been reviewed. The message doesn’t even tell you if you were successful or not. I did a search in Google and for the first time in over a month my site was back up there! It was a great feeling.

I hope you can do the same with your site. If you have any questions, I’m happy to help. Good luck.

Understandably people can become very anxious when they’re rank drops in Google. They often feel they have been hit by a penalty. I was one of those people a few months ago. I got my website back on track in the end. If you’re in that situation try to relax. I’m going to tell you how I fixed the problem, and if you want it badly enough you can fix the problem too.

First of all you need to determine if you really have a Google penalty. Ask yourself the following questions:

Have you been deindexed? Was your site in the index but is now entirely missing?

If you search for the URL of your homepage, does your website show up? If not, it could just be a bug. Try again tomorrow and/or from another computer so that you are connecting to a different Google data centre. If you’re still not showing up (but you were in the past), the bad news is you’ve been deindexed. The good news is I had the same problem and fixed it. This is what my rankings looked like from just before my deindexing, to just after being reincluded:

If you have been deindexed, you can skip the rest of this page and read about how to get reindexed. If not, you may have a smaller penalty, keep reading.

Are your bad rankings just temporary?

First of all, don’t panic (I know it’s easier said than done). Rankings often have a temporary drop, especially if you’ve made changes to your site such as updating your title tag. Here’s an example of a random temporary rank drop I experienced for a particular keyword:

Here’s how to test if it is just a temporary drop. Search for your keyword, find your listing and click the “Cached” version of your site. At the top of the page you should see “This is Google’s cache of www.yoursite.com. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on…” note the date down so you will know when the cache has updated. Until then your rank is unlikely to change much. Once the cache has updated you will hopefully return close to your original position, if not, keep reading.

Was your former higher rank just temporary?

As rankings can randomly drop, they can also randomly improve for a short time. If your rank was only high for a week and is now lower, you likely haven’t been penalized; you’ve just been put back in your place.

Was your site in a stable position for over a month and has suddenly dropped by more than two pages?

A new site will often bounce around the search results. Here are the daily search rankings for a specific keyword for one of my latest website;

You can see these rankings are up and down like a yo-yo. This doesn’t mean a penalty has been applied. So if your results are looking like this, don’t worry. Just carry on with what you’re doing, and your rank will settle down after a few weeks.

Have you made any dramatic changes to your website recently?

It might be the case that you have simply made your website less search engine friendly. If you have made changes to your site’s structure, navigation, title tags or any other large alteration to the page which is not ranking where it once was, this could have caused your rank to drop because you inadvertently effected your search engine optimisation.

Have you lost any important backlinks?

If you’re aware of where your most important backlinks came from, check they’re are still up. If they have been removed or nofollowed for whatever reason, contact the website owner and try to get them back. If the links are still there, it could be a penalty.

Have you checked robots.txt?

I have a friend who thought he had a Google penalty for 6 months before realising he’d forgotten to let the Google bot crawl his site. Make sure you’re not making the same mistake. Robot.txt lets you tell search engines if you don’t want them to index your site. Check www.yoursite.com/robots.txt. If get a page that mentions “file not found” and/or “404” you don’t have a robots.txt file and so it isn’t preventing Google from coming to your website. If you get a page with anything else on it, check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard#Examples to see if your robot.txt file is set up correctly.

If you’ve answered all the questions and still feel you have a penalty, it’s time to make some changes and let Google know what changes you’ve made. Find out how by reading about how to get reindexed with Google.