Duplicate Content
Its been over a month since our website started being affected negatively by Google. In attempts to diagnose the cause of our Google rankings descent, we were able to determine there were definitely site errors needing attention.  Broken links, missing URLs, and HTTP errors are now fixed and we have even created a new, efficient design for our homepage. As of today our rankings continue to fall and we have now discovered a new issue. Google only has 150 pages indexed for www.denverfabrics.com and our site actually has over 10,000 pages. Advice from some very intelligent people (thanks 5 Star) has lead me to believe the problem might be duplicate content. Google sees Denver Fabrics as having two sites: www.denverfabrics.com and denverfabrics.com. Today we will be creating a re-direct from denverfabrics.com to www.denverfabrics.com and will wait and see if that solves our problems with Google. As Tom Petty says “The waiting is the hardest part”.
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Data driven sites generally have a great deal of duplicate content (ie different views of the data). I use the robots.txt file to block google from pages that have duplicate data.
I do think that something weird is going on with google. They used to give a great deal of weight to small craft web sites. That emphasis seems to be dwindling. Your inbound link page from Google shows only 140 links.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.denverfabrics.com&btnG=Search
The page from All The Web shows 12,800.
http://alltheweb.com/search?cat=web&cs=utf8&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.denverfabrics.com&rys=0&itag=crv&_sb_lang=pref
Sadly, I’ve noticed that a large number of craft related sites have gone under. Your google woes might be the result of consolidation in the crafting web site space.
One tool any affiliate should not be without is an affiliate link cloaker. Affiliate link cloakers will mask and disguise your affiliate links to help prevent affiliate link hijacking. Anyone who has done affiliate marketing before knows about this.
There is a free service at http://www.urlfreeze.com that you can use to help fight against affiliate link hijacking. Hope that helps.
Chris