Content site and affiliate site cross-linking

[manzan]

We have had a very popular educational content site with PR 6 (with a good number of external backlinks) with about 6000 content pages, and many of these pages used to come very high up in SERPs.

To get some revenue from our site, we added (in October) a whole bunch of affiliate pages. We used 12 new 3rd level domain names, e.g, red-widgets.mysite.com, blue-widgets.mysite.com. We used extensive cross-linking between mysite.com and these affiliate sites. These sites were somewhat successful and we used them to support our content site. With the brandy update, all our keywords (both from the educational site and the affiliate sites) have moved way down the search results (pages 2-5 from page 1).

It looks like content site rankings are getting lowered due to cross-linking with affiliate sites. Could this be possible or could this be purely due to the new 'hilltop' algorithm.

We would like to be sure that we are being penalized for having affiliate links before taking the affiliate sites down. However, we do notice that the search results for all the affiliate keywors are totally dominated (up to 95% in the top 100) by 100% boiler plate affiliate site pages.

Just trying to figure out what our next step should be.

Thanks.

[a_chameleon]

manzan..

Are the affiliate sites all in the same IP address block?
Hosetd by the same server?

[manzan]

They are hosted by the same company but the IP addresses starts with different numbers (if this is what you meant by different blocks).

[Hardwood Guy]

This topic has been on my mind too. I put up a number of affiliate links on my pages about the same time. Then the Florida update came around and BOOM---good keyword phrases bit the dust. Now some are coming back nicely with this Brandy update, but I'm still wondering.

Thanks for bringing it up Manzan:)

[manzan]

hardwood guy, did you make any changes after the florida/austin update?
It is interesting that we did not have any problems with the florida/austin update. But it started just before the brandy updates. So far, it is still bad and we think we are down due to some spam filter but not sure if it is the multi-domains or having affiliate links on content page.
I see some really good content sites that exist because they can support themselves through affiliate sites. If it is true that affiliate links are not appreciated on content sites, then many of these sites will probably languish (This is probably not google's problem). In a way it is going against google's present objective of having good content sites.
It would be interesting to know google's perspective on this issue.

[Hardwood Guy]

Manzan:

I didn't make any changes except kept plugging away with more and more content. I ignored most of the "noise" in the update threads, assuming the guys that have been around must know something. I know I was critical of google a few weeks ago by saying something along the lines of "they don't care for more content anymore." It looks like it's finally paying off as I'll probably surpass a daily visitor count record by at least 25% today.

Better yet..the quality visitors are back! I'm still wondering about the affliate links as some good KW phrases haven't come back, but they're creeping up. This business will drive anyone nuts if you don't have the patience