Internet Marketing for the massesTechnology blog about internet marketing and tech related news.

I blogged before about how I had gotten some sort of penalty. This can be difficult to isolate if you did a bunch of things at once. In my case I bought some links and sold some links. Hehe, I didn’t sell the two links to pass on page rank, only to pay revenue, but the problem was that after selling the links and getting penalised my income on that site had fallen a lot, from about $5 a day to at its worst about .60c. This slowly recovered but the number of page impressions were drastically down. Using Google Webmaster Tools, only showed that I was ranking about 80 something for a couple of keyphrases, some meta tag problems ( still fixing these - and yes meta des does make a difference ) a couple 404s, and some empty redirects - missing links from a traffic exchange program. Most of these were fixed but I kept the 2 paid links up.

However I think Google was giving me a clue as to what the problem was. A couple of links I had sold to a site not particularly in my niche but in a similar niche, seemed to be the problem in the sense that when finding the keyphrase it had the text that the sponsored link site wanted under the search term, which not only looked stupid but made me take it down.

Here you can see where the punishment comes in:

That’s a huge drop in traffic, this came about after or around the reported Dewey update, this graph tends to lag by a few days and I’m confident that in a couple of weeks it will be back to a similar level as before.

Now don’t ask me how Google knows whether you have sold links or not, as it maybe a new algorithm update or human edited, it’s hard to say. The only thing I can say is after removing the paid links, the site has come out the penalty zone. For the $10 a month I got for the link, I lost more than 10 times that easy in lost traffic.