Google drops affiliate links from it's database.

 SEO NEWS

Last month Planet Ocean reported changes occurring on April 30th – the very same day they went to publication for the May '03 issue. Specifically, we saw what appeared to be a possible "Onmouseover" or affiliate link penalty adversely affecting PageRank scores within Google.

Throughout the month of May we received many similar reports about pages that contained affiliate links inexplicably showing a gray bar (i.e., an unknown page based upon the PageRank Rating) within the Google Toolbar which indicates the page was purged from the Google index. In every case, doing a Google search specifically for these pages themselves confirmed they no longer existed in the index.

Our last second speculation that Google was penalizing the Javascript Onmouseover turned out to be false when, instead, it became evident that additional pages that were NOT using the Javascript Onmouseover were also being dropped by Google in the same fashion. Eventually our research, facilitated by continuing reports from subscribers, revealed that sites experiencing this problem shared in common their use of affiliate links to major affiliate networks, like Commission Junction and others – each of these pages had links to sites that utilized a third party redirect.

In case you are wondering, a third party redirect is when a site visitor is briefly passed through a traffic monitoring site before being redirected to the target merchant page after clicking a link.

It appears that this is the cause of the problem given that pages with links to small affiliate networks and/or pages that use internal redirects to the affiliate networks are not having the same issues.

Then, on or about May 15th, we began seeing some of these missing pages show back up in the Google index and even ranking well. However their toolbar PR values remained much lower than we expected. About this time, many, many people started seeing problems with the PR indicator on the Google toolbar – many sites' link pages (sitemap pages) began showing very low PageRank values or even a gray bar (no value) – some reported their pages completely disappearing from Google.

The only explanation, and one posted by "Googleguy" (an employee of Google) in the Webmasterworld.com Google Forum recently, is that Google is implementing some significant changes to the index that reportedly include some new spam filters. Apparently, what many people have been seeing throughout May at Google was the more-than-occasional incomplete index.

Our best advice at this time is to not make any rash changes to your websites until this index settles down and remains more consistent. If your pages are missing from Google they may just not be in this version of the index yet. Links that have developed over the last few months may also not be in the index at this time. Base your judgments on how your pages are ranking, not what the toolbar is showing because the PageRank measurement does indeed appear to be acting a bit flaky.

In regard to links to affiliate networks, the jury is still out on this one. We've got pages that came back and started working again, there's others that have not. If this is due to a filter of some sort, we can't be sure what to do until Google either implements, or discards, the changes that are affecting those pages.

Now may be a good time to focus more on developing relevant new links to your site and to practice a little patience. Hopefully Google will get it together soon and return to consistency.

 SEO NEWS