Misleading banners cause drops in ranking?

[Killah]

I have a question to all of you that had similar experiences with placement of banners that pretend to be part of the website.
There are 4 software download websites, all very old (6-7y) and with different natural link structure.
They had a positive/stable traffic trend over 5+ years, 80% SE traffic, no G-rollout, no mayday was able to shatter their traffic.
Until I added a bunch of banners to them that show ‘Download Now’ ‘Download for iPhone’ ‘Download Upates’ and similar texts, pretending to be part of the website.
People click them like hell. Sales are great, more valuable than other banners before. 2 weeks later, the traffic starts to drop. 1000 uniques a weekend through out the 4 sites.
All together fall since that day, the traffic has decreased by 40% since the banners were added in January. Now I am at the point where I need to keep these banners and their income
in order to pay the bills. It’s a trap I felt into and at the moment I am not so sure what to do.
Should I wait until the worst point is reached and see what’s left then in a few weeks/months, risking that it will keep sinking until almost no traffic/revenue is left. Or should I pull the breaks now
and deal with a loss of $ that will break down a lot of things in the company/life? It sucks to be at that point after so many years of stable traffic.
Even Panda didn’t’ steal that much traffic that it would be a disaster like now. But Panda plus the banner issue is was too much.
Holdtime stayed the same when the banners were added, Bouncerate decreased by a minimal 2% Average pages per visit stayed the same.
80% of the people click first the banner to the advertisers page and then after realizing it was not right to go there proceed with my page as they always do.
Did you experience similar ranking problems due to placement of such missleading banners? The interesting thing is that these banners were on my pages, served for a large % of the traffic via an ad rotator on an affiliate network for 3 months already until we installed them permanently. After the permanent instalment and serving the banners from our domain, the traffic started falling.

[goodroi]

How large were the banners? What percentage of the page did it fill up?

Was your ad rotator run on javscript and was your permanent banners run statically?

[Killah]

On one site i replaced 3 banners that were adsense and an affiliate network before but the same dimension and position with the new 'download / play online / signup for free etc. missleading banners. 728x90, 468x60 and 300x250. the first 2 are above the fold, the 3rd inside a text (unique on each page). The permanent banners are static for all countries, the old ones were country based but i know that a large % (80+) was using the same banners I am using now (directly to the advertiser, not through the affiliate network anymore).

[Killah]

On the other 3 sites I replaced only one banner (468x60) with a statc new one, the 728x90 and the 300x250 are still as before the crash in january.

[Killah]

Some more info that could be the reason of the drop, the 4 sites are interlinked, not all link to each other but at least 3 to 1 and the rest interlinked. Maybe G considers this now as link network and devalueated the links.
Do you think it might help to cut the internal linking between the websites to normalize things? Its a risk because the links seem to carry a lot of juice.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Long term advice - don't lose focus of content quality, it's the #1 reason your site deserves traffic.

Short term advice - check for new competitors and look for new visitors.

IMO if you send too many of your visitors to the same affiliate site(s) Google might start to think your site is a funnel for that site and either send them directly to the aff site or find a better site to send those visitors to, instead of yours.

Maybe just move the ads a little so they are less clicked? You need the money but you need to have favorable user metrics too.

[Robert Charlton]

How often are the sites interlinked... and does each site have independent inbound links from sites that you don't control?

[FranticFish]

Isn't it lovely that Google is now dictating to people how they can monetise their site? The banners 'get clicked like hell' and 'sales are great', and yet Google has demoted the site based on an algorithmic interpretation of poor user experience.

This is the same company that tells its users what it thinks they searched for. Staggering arrogance.

[topr8]

>>Isn't it lovely that Google is now dictating to people how they can monetise their site?

the OP admitted that the banners were 'deceptive' ... am i the only one that is glad google is trying to downgrade sites like this? as a user it really annoys me when i am tricked into clicking a link that isn't what it seems

[Killah]

IMO if you send too many of your visitors to the same affiliate site(s) Google might start to think your site is a funnel for that site and either send them directly to the aff site or find a better site to send those visitors to, instead of yours.

THIS could be the point, a very interesting idea/observation.
In fact my sites send out almost 80% of the visitors to the same affiliate url until they come back to my page and see the real (also well visible) download link under the fold.
This could be the reason, it's for sure the first thing I will change/rethink today since it would make so much sense.

[Killah]

How often are the sites interlinked... and does each site have independent inbound links from sites that you don't control?

I think they are rather 'ok' interlinked, not too spammy. Two sites link to the 3 others, another doesnt link to all 3, the 4th site links only to one of the 4. Overall these sites dont link out to more than 10 external websites, I tried to keep the circle small but natural.
All sites have independent old links, not under my control and no bad history or penalties over the past years.

[Killah]

Long term advice - don't lose focus of content quality, it's the #1 reason your site deserves traffic.

I won't, content is king on these sites, they get updated daily with new texts. However we dont produce new pages often or at all - Do you think this is a big NO for Google as the site obviously doesnt grow in numbers of pages, only the old pages get updated?

Short term advice - check for new competitors and look for new visitors.

The Link Building machine is working since a few weeks and will keep working until the traffic recovered hopefully.

Maybe just move the ads a little so they are less clicked? You need the money but you need to have favorable user metrics too.

I was hoping that the almost identical bouncerate,holdtime and pages/visit would make google happy. But there seems to be some other issue and that seems to be that they maybe consider the sites a gateway now.

Maybe someone had experiences with such kind of 'tunnel/gateway' penalty? The traffic started dropping on all sites at the same time, 2 weeks after i added the banners. It would be nice if Google would reconsider this as well in 2 weeks after the banners were changed in a way its not a gateway anymore.

[Robert Charlton]

I won't, content is king on these sites, they get updated daily with new texts. However we dont produce new pages often or at all - Do you think this is a big NO for Google as the site obviously doesnt grow in numbers of pages, only the old pages get updated?

YES, I'd say it's a big NO... assuming, ie, that you're talking about new content on pages that retain their old urls.

The number of pages isn't the point... it's what the pages are about. If that is constantly changing, Google is going to have a hard time classifying your pages in relation to the semantic signals, onpage and offpage, that it considers for optimization.

Particularly now, when Google is calibrating and refining a new algorithm, I think that constantly changing content is going to cause huge confusion.

[Shaddows]

How can your legacy backlink profile remain relevant when the content has changed? How is today's links going to aid tomorrows content?

As per RC, its a problem.

[Killah]

YES, I'd say it's a big NO... assuming, ie, that you're talking about new content on pages that retain their old urls. The number of pages isn't the point... it's what the pages are about. If that is constantly changing, Google is going to have a hard time classifying your pages in relation to the semantic signals, onpage and offpage, that it considers for optimization.

Nono, this is not happening :) What I mean is that we have ie. 5000 product pages and all of them have their own unique content like reviews and user comments. We keep adding comments and reviews. The content/product of the page stays the same, never changes. The only bad thing is that we dont add new products with new pages, we just keep adding content to the existing products.
So my question is rather: How much weight does G lay on website growth by regularily adding new urls with unique content. It's for sure a positive signal, i'm not sure how strong through.
We only update the 'old' existing pages by adding new small portions of relevant texts/content to them.

[Killah]

How can your legacy backlink profile remain relevant when the content has changed? How is today's links going to aid tomorrows content?

the content doesnt change, we just add small portions of relevant text (reviews/comments), not changig the overall keyword plan of the pages.

[Robert Charlton]

OK, that's a better situation.

My inclination would be to paginate the comments and reviews so that, beyond the first few, additional vocabulary doesn't dilute your core product page information and descriptions.

I don't think I would have the pagination rely simply on chronology, though. The best systems I've seen appear to have a way of placing the most useful reviews (positive and negative) on the product pages and then putting the rest on a deeper page(s). There are a great many refinements you could introduce into such a system, which makes for a very complicated (and probably custom) CMS.

[Robert Charlton]

PS... getting back to the original topic of banners... several things about them still isn't clearly described. Are these ads to take visitors to sites that you don't own, or are they fake ads to crosslink your own sites?

As best as I can tell from your description, if each page is crosslinking as much as you say, that's too much. If the banners are ads to other sites, are they nofollowed in some way?

missleading banners... the first 2 are above the fold...

Again, the image isn't clear to me, but "misleading" sounds like "misleading", and that's something that Panda seems to be reacting against.

[Killah]

Finally back to work after a short offtime. We did today the first changes to fight against the Gateway Penalty. I will keep posting here if and how things changed.

First about the 'missleading banners': If you have a software download page where you have a description of the software along with 2 reviews and some comments. and you put a banner with 'Download Now | Download for iPhone | Download Update' and some similar texts ontop of the fold and the 'real' download link is below the fold, many people click first on the banner. This is what I call missleading. However, we added a symbol (i) in the right lower corner of the banner that opens a text "Advertisement" when you mouseover it. So we tell the surfers that this is not the real download button, but many (70-80%) click it anyway.

We show only 2 reviews and a limited amount of comments on the pages, so after these 2 slots and the comments slots are 'filled up' over time, we dont add more/new content anymore on that page.

The banners were and still are nofollowed.

Now the changes we made, would be great if you can give some comments about them:
Instead of sending traffic to one url, we splitted this into 4 different urls on 2 different ip blocks, 2 for each ip block. There are also now 2 different landingpages instead of one.
The 4 urls get rotated and a 5th slot is used for a different affiliate network. They rotate equal, so 20% for each of the 5 slots.
Right now the links are nofollowed but directly to the advertiser. Today we will add a redirect-gateway page which is excluded by robots.txt including NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW in the page header. This will redirect after 1 seconf to the affiliate url (that we used directly before).
Do you think it's ok/good/bad to use this new gateway page instead of direct links?
We are working on more changes that should help, I'll post them asap.

[indyank]

I think the problem lies in the fact that the user comes back to your site after clicking those banners, as they realize that they are not the download links.

I don't think the fact that traffic is sent to the same URL mattered.

However, we added a symbol (i) in the right lower corner of the banner that opens a text "Advertisement" when you mouseover it.

This could still be misleading as people might think that the site is opening an ad when they click the download link.They realize that it is not the download link only after landing on the other site.

Isn't it possible to add a different banner image which makes it clear that it is an advertisement?

How does the banner ad lead to the new site? Does it open in a new browser tab or window?

[Killah]

@indyank - It's exactly like you describe, surfers click the banner and come back to my site to click the correct download link.
I could use other banners but that would kill the clickthrough and sales. The banners open the affiliate links in a new tab.