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Our site is a directory of Real Estate Professional (Home Inspectors). Their are multiple organizations that respected in the industry. We use with permission the following and wonder if this is why we have been penalized or banned.
1. Misuse of competitor names.
Our site list names of organizations and their Standards of Practice and Code of Ethics. We post this information for our users to understand what each of our members qualifications are. We have never asked for permission to post their policies, but each inspector has them posted on his or her sites.
2. Excessively cross-linking sites to inflate a site's apparent popularity.
We have 6 pages of industry links with less than 10 links on each.
This is the only two things I can see that may have caused a red flag. If anyone can help shed some light on this I would appreciate it.
Thank you
I have Google ads on my site! Would you consider those Affiliate Links? I don't have any other link where I make money.
Excessive cross-linking, duplicate domains and stolen content are probably the majors. You'll also want to take inventory of your site to make sure there are not any doorway pages hanging around form previous SEO efforts.
We have 6 pages of industry links with less than 10 links on each.
If you delve a bit deeper into the linking you can better rule it in or out as a possible problem. Are these one-way links or reciprocals? Do they include cross links to any other sites you control? If reciprocal or cross links, does the site have a good number of other incoming links? Etc., etc.
Thank you for taking the time to help!
Some of the links are reciprocals and some are one-way. Cross links I have no idea. I would have to do some research on that. We used to offer one-way link exchanges with a directory I own. This might be why we are having the problems now. When I started out I made stupid mistakes to promote my site. I didn't know what I was doing could hurt the site. I should have read, read some more, than read again. Of course now I would never do any of these things.
Do I still have a problem? I could aways just delete the six pages.
How do I plead my case and make things right?
Yeah, that three-way link exchange sounds like the tip of your iceberg.
It's not that having affiliate links is enough to get you banned. It's also the content that goes with those links. If there is nothing useful about your site in terms of helpful or authoritative content that cannot be found elsewhere then forget it. And don't lie to yourself: Sales copy is not content.
Is the algo really sophisticated enough in semantic analysis to be able to tell the difference?
It's not that having affiliate links is enough to get you banned
In some cases it will. Maybe not algorithmically, but some editors will make sure you are not included in the search results if you have affiliate links of any kind. Yahoo may not have intended for this to happen when they wrote their guidelines, but some editors seem to blindly apply penalties whenever they see an affiliate link. Some affiliates work very hard to develop content; the presence of affiliate links should not imply to the editors that the content is useless and duplicated. Maybe it comes down to propery training their editors to know what they are looking for and to use intelligent judgement.
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