Manual Action WTG Google

[Wild Reels]

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Google has detected thin content on your site that provides little or no added value

Cheers for that Google, nothing like working your bollocks off with a normal job, and trying to maintain a site on a daily basis including weekends.

Maybe i need to write a 3 page article on using the "Martingale Strategy as a license to print money", or some other retarded how to play slots - press the spin button, hope to win .... which is probably viewed by google as great content if i write enough words about it.

Site was realy picking up over the last few months, and now i get punched in the bollocks by google...

 

[vinylweatherman]

Maybe Google is picking up on the banners and the fact that all the slot review articles advertise a specific offer at a casino, possibly causing Google to classify the slot reviews as adverts, and thus classing the entire site as a "banner farm".

Google has annoyed many webmasters by messing around with how it classifies sites and content, and is often accused of getting it wrong because it uses a set of algorithms, rather than humans exercising some common sense, to review sites.

No doubt others have also woken up to this nasty surprise, having also worked their bollocks off.

 

[Wild Reels]

they might as well send you an email saying, great news are you ready! we have killed your site overnight for you, pages that were ranking on page 1 for reasonably competetive keywords are now on page 6, pretty much everything is on page 6, even searching for the name of the site is probably on page 6 now....

I dont doubt there are other aff sites which are better, i know there are also plenty which are way worse, but i wouldnt wish this on anyone espcecially someone who does it full time, you can send a reconsideration request which i have done already, they kill your site overnight, but this little procedure takes weeks to process, and there is no guarantee concerning the outcome.

I dont even rank for an exact match search for the site on page 1 now, google deems my facebook page as being more relevant to users, when all it contains is links for new articles posted on the website.

Guess i need to start cracking on with some irrelevant guides on how to play a slot , and some top 10 tips for winning on slots (with bonus secrets if you share) in an infographic which are all lies but make for good social shares.

The biggest thing is you are absolutely helpless, they are the dominant force for a search engine, if it dosent appear anywhere in their site then it seems pointless to bother, i wrote a couple of articles today and submitted them, i dont think they are thin content and what a surprise they rank on page 6, instead of page 1 or 2 for those keywords.

 

[mathsboy1975]

The biggest thing is you are absolutely helpless, they are the dominant force for a search engine, if it dosent appear anywhere in their site then it seems pointless to bother, i wrote a couple of articles today and submitted them, i dont think they are thin content and what a surprise they rank on page 6, instead of page 1 or 2 for those keywords.

Yep and when Google change their algorithms next time it could happen all over again....

 

[Nicola]

I feel for you. I had the same action taken in August 2013 on one of my business sites, it f**ked it within a week with no organic traffic from Google or partner sites. I spent a while sorting things out and then e-mailing Google for the action to be removed but they replied saying it was still not right.

In the end I had to buy a new domain, hire a copywriter to re-word everything and then publish it. Thankfully, two years on everything is back where it was with around 10k daily organic traffic. I would seriously cry if it happened again.

 

[rainmaker]

.

Sorry to hear about your problems. That sucks.

I have visited your site from time to time and it is a professional-looking site with a lot of original content so I am very surprised to hear that Google has detected «thin content» on it.

Like me, you are always very early on writing about new games, promotions and other stuff. Often days or weeks before most other affiliates. I am sure this is something visitors find much more valuable than useless 2000 words articles on how to play a slot. Guess Google disagree.

I don't have any knowledge about this, but you might want to check out affiliateguarddog.com if you need more advice/help. I am sure there are other affiliates over there who have experienced the same.

I also found some information about «thin content» on Google including a video from Matt Cutts:

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Good luck and please keep us updated as this is obviously something that can happen to any of us.

 

[Wild Reels]

I've raised the question directly on the google webmaster forums for all the good it will do, for a site in this niche I really don't see what they expect to find at a casino affiliate site,

Sometimes the content is thin when there isn't much to say without waffling about a subject and the offer may be very direct, but it still worth sharing with players.

The question I've been asking myself is why my site has been specifically targetted, and its not like they offer any initial advice as to what the problem really is.

 

[slotplayer]

might need more content above the page fold.

 

[Simmo!]

might need more content above the page fold.

I was going to say the same thing. A while back, G introduced their "Above The Fold" algo change. Any site where you arrive and the intention is seen by them to drive customers away from the site was penalised heavilly. On Wild Reels, although it looks very good, "above the fold" is all offers and off-site Calls To Action.

IMO the best thing to do is re-evaluate the positioning of all your content. I'd suggest what you have is great for PPC but not for organic listings.

 

[dunover]

At least it beats the manual action I get.

 

[Elgoog]

wtf?? i wouldn't call that call thin content?

 

[Wild Reels]

So basically it would seem that it boils down to, to have the honour of being listed correctly in their search engine you need to provide value in your content that google deem to be great content, its quite a scary proposition that not only do they control the search engines, but with that have the power to dictate what you need to write about on a website too.

You can happily have a website which has affiliates links provided that it is not the primary focus of the website, irrespective of whether this is what people who are searching for, want to find, and do find via the terms they are using to search for.

The main issues i have here are as follows,

Something that provide the user with a better experience,

Casino affiliates can be a shady bunch,

I regularly see "casino reviews" on other affilate site that abuse rich snippets, the casino review, article always scores 4/5 or 5/5 or 98% in the review it even scores 5/5 and abuses rich snippets even if there isnt a review.., but these sites have gone untouched, and are still happily going about their business, do i need to throw my morals out the window in the name of great content?

The point here is, if i deemed a casino to be poor scorely why i would i bother listing it on my site in the first place, and it angers me that some of the big sites continue to do this.

I see articles that as a player when i read them i feel disgusted at the misinformation and bullshit posted, but are these the kind of articles i must write in order to be deemed as providing great content.

I could start a forum, but why would i when the central place of information is here, and even the big rivals to this site who have forums are a joke in comparison.

I could add a section with free to play slots, does google see this as valid content? as i player if i want to play slots in test mode i simply go to a casino and do it, maybe this is worth adding.

So for people who run similar sites it would seem you have 2 options,

Dont become too succesful and get noticed by google, i would recommend that all of the smaller sites that use that a simialr style to me use a redirect script, and sort your aff links so you arent a lighthouse to google, if you are using wordpress then something like

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is well worth reading, and dont get confused by the term "cloaking", it will actually make your life 10 times easier once set up.

Start adding content, not for your users, but content which you think google will deem good content for your users, because if they dont deem it great nobody will ever get to see it anyway

And finally thank you to all the input so far, apart from Dunover , I am very angry right now and generally a very stubborn person, but i have taken on board the comments posted here, and have come up with a few ideas in order to improve the user experiance on my site, whether this is good enough for the big G remains to be seen.

 

[Wild Reels]

i posted a thread on the aff guard dogs forum, and got some mixed feedback for things to try an implement, i have done a few of these so far

removed lots of ads on the front page sidebar, the footer will be next when i get time to add more stuff anyway (it was planned)

internalised much of the front page, as i was probably linking straight out of the site too much to early

tidied up the navigation

added a new guides/info section - which again i plan to expend on when i have time, after writing a 6.500 article on high variance slots im kinda washed out

and today removed some things from the sitemap.xml file, i make use of both categories and tags in wordpress to allow users to find articles of the same nature slots/ casinos/ free spins and tags for the more specific like netent/ mg/ casino name.

I was previously submitting both cats and tags into the sitemap, which may or may not have lead to google thinking this was duplicate content, as the posts i make could quite easily show up in both, so for now im only sunbmitting pages/posts and tags.

From today after making these changes the site magically appeared back into its usual places for various terms, no word from google though yet, so fingers crossed it was one or a few of those things, or maybe just their algos going screwy.

i just hope thats the end of it for a while so i can get back to normal and do what i was doing, plus add more content in the spare time thats left over.

 

[justred]

I was going to say the same thing. A while back, G introduced their "Above The Fold" algo change. Any site where you arrive and the intention is seen by them to drive customers away from the site was penalised heavilly. On Wild Reels, although it looks very good, "above the fold" is all offers and off-site Calls To Action.

IMO the best thing to do is re-evaluate the positioning of all your content. I'd suggest what you have is great for PPC but not for organic listings.

And perhaps it goes a little deeper than that. There is very little on the home page that is unique. You mainly list promos. If you search google for your news article abstracts text you get tons of results. Google has seen all of this already by the time it hits your site. It needs to be balanced with something that it has not seen.

My 2c but who the hell knows?

 

[slotsgeek]

Sorry to hear that, your articles are pretty decent in word count. Try to get rid of most of those banners on the frontpage. The choice is way to much I think, why not just 3 casino banners, you have them mentioned in the blog posts as well. So it's not that visitors wont see the brands. Try to make Google see you more as an information website. Your casino bonuses page has got 80 outgoing affiliate links, that's a lot! Maybe you can add some more content and just display 10 enteries first. If you fixed all that and maybe som more. You can do some kind of reconsideration, but it's has no use of discussing it with Google right now I recon.