Affiliate Musketeer

As I write this post my affiliate website is not ranking for any of its target terms in google, not even its own site name. In yahoo, the site is showing that it has 23 backlinks from other sites. In google’s webmaster tools, it shows 11 incoming links. In terms of pages indexed, according to google’s site:www.barstoolsuk.co.uk command, I’m showing 199 pages indexed but according to google’s webmaster tools, out of 65 pages submitted via the sitemap, 0 are indexed.

This never used to be the case so I can only assume now that perhaps my site has been dropped completely out of google’s SERPs. This would reflect the immediate drop in organic traffic for just over a week now. The only thing that gives me some small hope is that the site: command still shows I have pages indexed but also when I run the rank checker plugin (provided as part of the SEOBOOK firefox plugin), I am showing some rankings (albeit around the 150 mark for some pretty random searches – although it suggests I’m at rank 114 for ‘kitchen bar stools’).

So basically, my battle is that I’m struggling to rank organically for anything at the moment – even my site name – and my google webmaster tools is showing indexed urls: 0. This would suggest Ive been totally dropped from the index for being a ‘thin affiliate site’, however there are some rankings left for other terms and I am still showing up under the site: command. This gives me a very small hope that perhaps what I am experiencing is no more than some sort of filtering process as google familiarises itself with my site, its age, its backlinks and its content.

So what can I do about it? I have no idea really but my gut is telling me to put some time into creating 1 or 2 really useful articles (I mean, really useful, not just 500 words of relevant text that sounds sort of useful) and to write a couple of original ‘news’ items for the site with some outgoing links to sites that rank in the top 5 in google for my target keywords to ‘associate’ myself with some respectable sites.

The salt in the wound with all of this is that last week, when my site enjoyed a 2 day return to page 1 of google, I sold 3 items….

Anyone else been through this? Am I overreacting? Is the indexed urls: 0 thing normal? How can I fight this?

- Edit – I’ve just been trying to read about why my indexed urls could be 0 and I’ve stumbled onto a Google Caffiene update thread….could my rankings drop have anything to do with google’s long awaited ‘caffeine’ update?

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