how to recover a site?

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ehwtfxz

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I have a 2yo amazon affiliate niche site with 100+ pages that has been hit by a Google Fred algorithm and traffic lost drastically since March 2017. At its peak, it earned over $2000 and now only $200.

I have done everything I could: got a few disavow services and removed bad links, added info content to balance ratio, hired a white hat guest post outreach service (and almost exhausted prospects in this and relevant niches), reduce affiliate links etc but to no avail. My rankings just keep dropping.

Annoying thing is many affiliate sites popped up in these 2 years and some even copied my site. Lots of them are ranking even with black hat links. Why was I the only one affected?

Any advice?
 
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It’s hard to say, but you really need to take a non-biased view of your site as a whole, and compare it to the new sites that have popped up:

What is your content like - length, uniqueness, informational value, quality, update frequency?

What are your links like - how many, what distribution, what type of quality, what anchor ratio, what metrics including traffic stats?

Sounds to me like it could be a combination of issues; if lot of new sites are popping up then it feels like they may have had new information to add, meaning your site might be out-dated.
 
davids355 said:
It’s hard to say, but you really need to take a non-biased view of your site as a whole, and compare it to the new sites that have popped up:

What is your content like - length, uniqueness, informational value, quality, update frequency?

What are your links like - how many, what distribution, what type of quality, what anchor ratio, what metrics including traffic stats?

Sounds to me like it could be a combination of issues; if lot of new sites are popping up then it feels like they may have had new information to add, meaning your site might be out-dated.
Click to expand...

I wrote the content at the start and then outsource them, reading them personally before uploading. Everything is minimum 1000 words. Buyer guides usually 1500 words up to 4000 words. I'm using thrivethemes so I designed every post personally, with images and videos etc. I'm pretty sure they are high quality articles. Trust me, there really isn't much new info to add. Pretty much all amazon reviews. There was a competitor who remained no.1 for a keyword for years with hardly any (visible) backlinks and really crappy content which DOES NOT update. No matter what I did I could not outrank it.

Links were a mix of BHW packages, PBNs, and some whitehat links. Even high quality PBNs like DIggity links did not move the needle. In fact the past few months I only bought quality PBN links from recommended sources (diggity, freedom, domain highways etc). Since being hit by the algorithm, I've used a couple of disavow services and removed most spammy links (mainly from BHW lol). I also hired a whitehat guestpost service who did manual outreaech and added 40 real guest post links with mixed/natural anchor texts.
 
If new sites with lesser content are out ranking your old site. Why not take your expertise on the subject matter and create a new domain with new similar content and start fresh... you still have a good budget to play with.
 
illuminateme said:
If new sites with lesser content are out ranking your old site. Why not take your expertise on the subject matter and create a new domain with new similar content and start fresh... you still have a good budget to play with.
Click to expand...

I guess I've invested too much money and time into it I don't wanna start a new domain and wait another 6 months or so.
 
Penalties are a motherfucker, and it may just be easier to start over, even if there's a shitload of work to be done. Find yourself a niche relevant domain that's in auction. It doesn't have to have an amazing backlink profile, as long as it's not spam. Rewrite each of your articles, even if just slightly. Make sure you're focusing on everything being the latest and greatest information as we venture deeper into 2018.


Hell, why not do both? Follow the advice above to start a second site, and begin re-creating everything. If you ever get your penalty removed, you'll have twice the opportunity to dominate that niche.
 
To be honest I think your mistake is that you continue to link build while disavow older spammy links. Your website is marked by the algorithm and you continue to build links, that a big no no in my opinion. Now you have no way to know if the penalty is still there because of the old shitty links or new "quality" links you got.. think about it - you got "quality" links for your penalized website. Do you think you are the only one that do this? So how good are those PBNs then if there are links to few penalized domains there?

I think its too late now to save this one now. Just leave it for a while do not build more links, let all rentals expired and collect your $200 per month. Maybe in a year or two Google will remove the penalty. In the meantime just start new one.
 
SensualTyrannosaurus said:
Penalties are a motherfucker, and it may just be easier to start over, even if there's a shitload of work to be done. Find yourself a niche relevant domain that's in auction. It doesn't have to have an amazing backlink profile, as long as it's not spam. Rewrite each of your articles, even if just slightly. Make sure you're focusing on everything being the latest and greatest information as we venture deeper into 2018.


Hell, why not do both? Follow the advice above to start a second site, and begin re-creating everything. If you ever get your penalty removed, you'll have twice the opportunity to dominate that niche.
Click to expand...

Yeah, if one site netted $2k before, he could do $4k or more stuffing the top of the serps with his own properties!
 
ehwtfxz said:
I have a 2yo amazon affiliate niche site with 100+ pages that has been hit by a Google Fred algorithm and traffic lost drastically since March 2017. At its peak, it earned over $2000 and now only $200.

I have done everything I could: got a few disavow services and removed bad links, added info content to balance ratio, hired a white hat guest post outreach service (and almost exhausted prospects in this and relevant niches), reduce affiliate links etc but to no avail. My rankings just keep dropping.

Annoying thing is many affiliate sites popped up in these 2 years and some even copied my site. Lots of them are ranking even with black hat links. Why was I the only one affected?

Any advice?
Click to expand...
can you show the site? We can try to figure out what exactly s going on
 
Well, your best bet is to clean up the backlink profile, website content if necessary and keep building only good quality backlinks. But even then just waiting and hoping is a nightmare so you could already start with a new website from aside just in case you don't end up waiting for 6mo without any results.
 
Thanks guys. Seems like the common consensus is that it is beyond hope. I'm gonna start a new site in another niche and let this wait out (while collecting the $200/m). However, if the earnings keep dropping to negligible, can I start a new site with the same content and 301 it? If 301 is not recommended, can I just use the same content (and update where necessary)? Regarding content uniqueness
 
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