Here is the story. I have been participating in the Zlio affiliating program since April 2007, and until recently, especially in terms of SEO, it was a dream. With a week, my old website of 300 pages was ranking ahead of Ebay, Nextag, Shopping.com, etc for many competitive keywords. I was very happy with the results and they were in place for over six months. Although I spent many hours working on my shops and acquired some quality link exchanges, I noticed that other Zlio affiliates were also performing extremely well.
I was receiving more and more visitors each day. I didn’t get rich, but I had a few sales every day and was very happy. However, this changed on the 28th of September. I noticed back then that the visits were decreasing, but I was not keen on the panic button, so I decided to wait for a few days. After few more days, visits dropped from 300 unique highly targeted visitors to 30. The strange thing is that Googlebot crawled the site 2 times since then and updated lots of the data in Webmaster Tools. My top rankings also changed but they still show that I am in the top 10, which is a real joke.
I have not one but fourteen shops with the program. It’s true that only three of them are up to speed; however, absolutely all of them lost rankings. And by that I don’t mean the sites were banned. Here comes the most peculiar thing: for all my highly targeted keywords (mainly names of products), I appear on page 7 or 8 in Google. No exceptions!
I’ve contacted other Zlio shop owners whom I noticed around me in the SERPs, and they had the same story. I am saying this to answer the question of whether I made any website changes in the week before the 29th of September.
There are two things I have in mind but I am not positive that I am right.
1. Once a Zlio shop is included in the program, it naturally receives a link from the then PageRank 5 Zlio directory as well as from other pages from the main domain with high PR. Now the directory PR is 0 (http://zlio.tf1.fr/directory) .
2. From my logs I know that one of the companies that has a contract with a merchant with whom Zlio works visited my website few times, then they lodged an Abuse Report to Zlio. After that, their lawyers visited the website regularly. The last time was in August. The reason they visited was that the Zlio shop appeared higher in the SERPs for valuable keywords than the company website. Why did Zlio not terminate my shop? There was no reason to do so, as I’ve done nothing illegal online. I imagine that the lawyers also lodged a request to Google, and our affiliate websites went through some “manual” review.
As I said, I am very concerned. There are 200,000 affiliate marketers out there who are concerned as well, so if anyone has any clue what might be the reason for this page 7 curse please, give me a shout.
One of my sites is http://billabong.zlio.com (I am not naming the site I’ve talked about above for “legal” reasons, at least not before it is clear what’s going on). And one more thing – I am perfectly fine in Yahoo and MSN, but I don’t think anyone’s surprised.
Thanks to all,
Lily
