up-down-down-down -- UP!

just when i was about to give up

[dibbern2]

So here I sit, guilty of having built a THIN affiliate site, and accepting the 40+ penalty that Goog smacked me with a year ago. I'm not angry with G, I think they're doing the right thing by cleaning out Ama stores and other thin affiliates.

And so I've invested about 80 hours in building a replacement site with the best I can do in original content, removing all THIN affiliate links, and generally trying to do the right thing.

And today my old nasty site suddenly is ranking between 2-5 for dozens of terms, and #1 for a lot of long tails!

Go figure.

[Bewenched]

Humm ... interesting. We have a very well established 10 year ecommerce website that lost alot of traffic today.

[dibbern2]

I should explain this a bit more. It's not my "new, improved" site that's ranking better. (I haven't posted any of the new content yet, since its not finished.)

It's the old THIN site, with all its warts.

Just a little irony.

[soapystar]

you left it alone...made no changes.....did not update already existing content...that seems to be whats wanted these days....

[nippi]

no... i have had this happen too. if you don't modify a thin affilaite... eventually the content changes on the parent site... and your content becomes.... more unique.

[asterix]

Sorry for being ignorant but what is a THIN site?

[tedster]

Here's a good discussion from the Hot Topics thread, pinned to the top of this forum's index page:

Avoiding penalties against "thin affiliate" pages [webmasterworld.com]

[trinorthlighting]

He answered everyones penalty questions here. He said "unique content"

Thats the topic of the year....

[Whitey]

Be careful - Google often resurrects a site it previously viewed as having duplicate content.

It hold the results for maybe a couple of weeks, then goes and re assess' it, then dumps it if the problem hasn't been fixed.

Check the fundamentals, remove the duplication [ if I'm correct ] and you should be OK. Leave it a long time, you could find that future fixes could take a long time to repair and produce results.