Dealing with a minus 50 penalty

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

My site received a minus 50 penalty and my traffic is down 90%. The only thing I've done recently was ad an advertising box in the sidebar that displays a price comparison for the item being discussed on page (which has 3-5 nofollow links to stores).

I really don't want to remove the ad box since it's useful and the income is most welcome but without traffic it's a moot point.

What are my options besides removing it? At this point if I continue working on a penalized site I am inclined to block googlebot since I don't need the site incessantly crawled with no benefit. I'm resisting that kneejerk reaction for now but really... it's like the online version of a death sentence, what to do?

[Planet13]

The only thing I've done recently was ad an advertising box in the sidebar that displays a price comparison for the item being discussed on page (which has 3-5 nofollow links to stores).

Not that I doubt you but... how can that lead to a minus 50 penalty? Especially if the links are nofollowed?

Are you sure there wasn't anything "offsite" that might have led to the penalty?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

The links are nofollow but they lead to an internal redirect page (that is noindex for good measure) before redirecting out to the stores. It's set up that way so that I can apply filters to the redirecting page and not send bots to stores(they see blank page), I've used this method for years without problem and doubt it's the problem. Some popular rss aggregating aff software does the same without problem too.

I'm wondering if, because it's in the sidebar of EVERY page, the entire site is deemed an aff site? There really is no obvious smoking gun, I'm still looking, but that was the only change I made.

Could it be the affiliate links on every page, even if in the sidebar?

[indyank]

any new links introduced site wide causes problems recently.This is despite the fact that they are nofollow and it is getting too crazy.

[agent_x]

It's set up that way so that I can apply filters to the redirecting page and not send bots to stores(they see blank page)

Do you mean search engine bots will see a blank page?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Do you mean search engine bots will see a blank page?

Yes, if the crawler goes through the affiliate link despite nofollow, which it will, they land on a blank page that has a noindex meta tag. It's common practice with some popular affiliate software too and hasn't been a problem before nor is it a problem on other sites.

Unfortunately some affiliate programs, such as eBay's EPN program, do not reward publishers who send too many bots.

This has been on the site without problem since launch, whatever the problem is it just happened and again the only change is the addition of a handful of aff links in the sidebar, a price comparison box directly related to the page content.

[agent_x]

Obviously if it works for you then it can't be the problem but I would be worried it could be seen as cloaking, otherwise I'd be doing similar. I certainly filter out anything that is a bot that isn't a friendly one, and just send a 403. However, if Google follows a link on your site and gets a blank page, won't it regard it as a soft 404, and question why you now have links to soft 404s on every page of your site?

[shazam]

I agree, I would think the g bot would see this as cloaking. I wouldn't filter/cloak the traffic in any way.

I would create a directory(s) specifically for the aff links. Put a script or scripts in there to do the redirecting. Then make this directory /nofollow /noindex

point your sidebar links to this directory.

href="http://domain.com/directory?widget=widgetA

[rememberramu]

I think its not the problem of few out going affiliate links. What are the link building activity you have done recently?

I have heard that Excessive paid links or unnatural link building activity can cause -50 penalty.

[martinacastro]

@rememberramu As we can see in some post here and in Google Support that minus 50 penalty is not only for unnatural link building, it covers now things, liks site quality, dup content, thin sites with affiliate links