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Are we being penalised by Google?

Just a month ago, we had about 1.7 million TicTap links in Google’s index. Now we are down to less than 1000.

I’m not sure why that should be the case, because we have added more information, and never tried to ‘cheat’ any search engines.

Someone mentioned that it could be because we are an Amazon.com Associate. Perhaps, but why should we be treated differently? We do not cram our pages full of Amazon links, we have also submitted our links to Google Sitemaps, and our logs show that Google crawls a few hundred thousand pages each month.

I have been visiting other Associate sites, and found one called shopireland.ie. A check with Google showed 2.27 million links from that site in Google’s index.

The main difference between them and us is that they serve Google ads, lots of them.

So my question is, are we being penalized because we do not serve Google ads?

My point is not that shopireland.ie is more popular than TicTap, but why so many of their pages are indexed, and ours are not?

This is puzzling and if anyone can offer advice on what we are doing wrong, I’d love to hear them in the comments section. (No registration is required)

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 at 2:21 am and is filed under General (talk). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Are we being penalised by Google?”

  1. Marc Mezzacca Says:
    May 2nd, 2006 at 8:25 pm

    Interesting… I’ve been looking into this as well…

    From what I have found there should be no direct relation to serving Google Ads and traffic ranking. However, we have noticed SecretPrices.com, which does not serve Google or any advertisements, has had some traffic loss over the past few months from Google. Have not yet determined why.

    Aside from the Google Ads theory, I do wonder if it could there might be some penalization for duplicate content as it seems some associate / affiliate sites get dropped rankings or not as many pages indexed.

  2. Next Generation Shopping » Blog Archive » Google Ads - Helping your site beyond revenue generation? Says:
    May 2nd, 2006 at 10:29 pm

    […] th Google Ads (mediabot). But does it go further than that? An interesting post entitled […]

  3. Alex Says:
    May 3rd, 2006 at 10:49 pm

    Marc, I have done some extra reading, and it seems that affiliate sites do not suffer a penalty. It’s all about the quality of content.

    I’m not sure why Google does what it does.

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