Posting Affiliate Links On Your Blog

I am posting this after recently having my blogging ass kicked by Google, my own stupid fault really. The problem was Amazon affiliate links, as they are the only site I’m affiliated with they form a big part of anything I want to sell which I may be talking about on my blog.

For 8 months blogging I don’t think I’m doing to bad, I talk about movies, music and television so I have quite a bit of competition. I managed recently (last couple of months) to have the blog on a page 3 ranking in Google, I know you I can’t tell it’s officially ranked there but it’s nice to have an idea. With that rank came traffic and pretty reasonable traffic considering the subject content. I was getting in the range of 500 to 700 hits per day most of which where from Google, with the hits also came AdSense earnings not much but a little most days.

Recently though I have been hit, and hit hard, probably something to do with that Panda we are all hearing so much about. My traffic went from the number mentioned above to a struggle to even get 400 a day usually around 300+, where has my traffic gone? what have I done wrong?

First few days I sat and watched to be honest, not giving it much thought other than being a little surprised I thought it was just a slight lull, and considering there where riots happening in London at the time I thought maybe people are reading up on that.

The riots stopped and after a few days my traffic still hadn’t recovered, now I’m thinking what’s going on here? Has someone similar to me stole my traffic with genius SEO methods that I know nothing about or has my site been downgraded in Google’s eyes?

I started to think what I had done differently recently from what I had done before, initially I thought nothing other than putting out more content, two posts a day and in my opinion they didn’t lack in the usual quality I like to think I put out. It’s not that. I link to some blogs that are not updated regularly, lets move them. What else have I changed, then it hit me.

I got there eventually, I put out two posts a week one in relation to music and the other which is a movie review, along with those posts I included a scrolling Amazon widget along the bottom. I thought at the time it didn’t look to pushy and I should be ok. This is clearly the problem I’m thinking. I finally confirmed it after a bit of research. Google does not like to many affiliate links, it makes your site look overly promotional, probably the reason you are limited to how many Amazon or eBay links you can have here on HubPages.

I hadn’t been doing it that long before Google dressed me down so it obviously doesn’t take much to make your site look over promotional. I went back to the drawing board, well my edit posts section and re published all the posts with Amazon links in them, but this time I deleted the Amazon capsule.

My traffic has recoverd slightly but I’m not quite back to where I was and according to PRChecker.com I am still on page 2 of Google’s rankings. You learn from your mistakes they say, and I have from this one. I have since come up with a sales page idea for the Amazon side of things but I’ll share that with you in another hub.