Update: Why Widget Bucks got banned

Update: According to Andy it seems they messed up a redirect which seems like a good enough reason for them to lose their pages to me.

Shoemoney and his readers are speculating about why Widget Bucks got banned from Google so lets take a look at what went wrong.

First of all it has nothing to do with the fact they link back to their site from the widget. Almost every widget in the world links back to the parent site and nobody else is getting banned. So what if the site says people can’t remove links, people are entitled to ask for a link when their content is used on a third party website. You don’t see Google banning photographers who ask for links as a credit.

If we look at the pages still indexed it seems that some Flash files are still present so the whole site hasn’t been hit (yet).

Luckily Yahoo gives us the answer right away, all the links to Widget Bucks have the users referrer id in them so there are thousands and thousands of pages with exactly the same content being indexed.

Sometimes Google can figure this out but when the site has so many incoming links combined with a non-standard affiliate link structure it was just too hard.

All Widget Bucks needs to do is set a cookie when somebody clicks on a referrer link and then 301 redirect the user to the main widgetbucks.com homepage and they will be back in Google within a few weeks.

Categories: Affiliate Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation

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