hbirnbaum - 2:04 pm on May 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

Cabbie,

I have to disagree. My site was recently penalised from a PR 7 to a PR 0. The only change I made to my site was to add an affiliate links section.

This contained about 20 links to external sites. None of which were penalised; all of them had PR. My site has since become a PR 0, and Google traffic has all but stopped.

This can only be related to the affilaite links. I still have plently of backlinks, even though Google now shows 0 backlinks, and my indexed paged have dropped from 50,000 to 2000. Many pages are even missing titles\descs.

I beleive I was penalised just for having an affiliate links section. I have since removed this, and the site is still PR 0 almost 2 months later.

Googleguy, can you comment on if my site was penalised just for having an affiliate links section? How long until I can expect some kind of recovery?

I really didn't think I was doing anything wrong. Forbes and Walstreet Journal have affiliate links on their pages. Surely they should be penalised to? However, I just want to get back in Google's good graces. What more can I do?