I did say I would be writing about the ups AND downs of affiliate marketing & today is the turn of a considerable down followed by a slight up!

I wrote previously about how well Cashback Shopper was doing in the rankings, but within days of that post, my rankings took a big hit from both Google & Yahoo ( With drops of up to 60 places on Google, I was astounded & quite disappointed.

I have read a recent rumour that there is a new -60 penalty that Google applies to websites in which it has lost trust; defined as sites that are guilty of spamming! However, the definition of spamming in this case seems to be that many of the websites that seem to have been penalised, had many inbound links from websites that linked to them from every single page of their website (so-called site-wide links). Sitewide links are an indicator of paid links, which Google sees as an unwanted way to artificially inflate search engine rankings.

Although I have not carried out such a campaign, I recently had Cashback Shopper added to a large number of directories and although all of these were free directories & spread over a few months, I believe it is possible that the number of new links may have grown too fast & Google has become suspicious. But, although I have taken a big hit, now is a time not to panic & give the rankings time to recover.

It is interesting how the different search engines look at websites….for example, for the phrase “cash back shopping”, on Google my ranking has plummeted from 14th to 65th, but on Yahoo it has risen back to 1st! In general, my rankings have improved in Yahoo, but deteriorated in Google. I’m sure that this is because Google looks at the relevancy of the inbound links & the directory entries, while valued by Yahoo, are deemed irrelevant & possibly even negatively by Google.

So, the idea now is to find linking partners that are relevant to cashback & work on recovering my Google rankings, which seem to have stabilised now.

I have also been adding linked key phrases from the Cashback Shopper blog, which may also be classed as site-wide links, so I will remove some of these & see if this makes any difference over the next few weeks.

But, if this penalty for paid links really exists then even websites that follow Google’s rules can get in trouble. Your competitors could harm your website simply by buying links or by creating mini-net websites with site wide links to your website. Instead of penalising seemingly “bad” links, Google should simply ignore them. That way, people could not harm competitor websites.