For a few months however, I have been ‘slapped’ by Google. The Google PR of this blog drops down to 3. The reason is clear:  paid linking. I put text link ads from text-link-ads.com and another UK company. Putting a paid link is a gross violation as far as Google goes. Google PR’s drop has severely affected my SERP (search engine result page) as well.  At least to me.

So, once I wanted to regain my PR, I remove all the paid linking ads from this site. The second step was: I went to Google Webmaster Tools following all the precedures, including submitting sitemap and verified it, and requested for “reconsideration request’ by honestly telling them that I have removed all stuffs that might violate Google TOS.

The third step I took was moving my non-www url address into www. Have a look at the browser, you’d find this blog URL with www: http://www.fatihsyuhud.com instead of http://fatihsyuhud.com. Matt Cutts, the Google senior guy, once said in his blog that a domain with www is better to Google search engine than a non-www one.

Note, however, that this www thing is only applied to the primary domain only such as fatihsyuhud.com. It’s not applied to a blog which use subdomain such as islam.fatihsyuhud.com, afatih.wordpress.com or afatihsyuhud.blogspot.com for the last case, you’d better use non-www; thus I use http://islam.fatihsyuhud.com, http://afatih.wordpress.com (for sub-domain) but I use http://www.fatihsyuhud.com (for primary domain)

For this change to happen, first I change the wordpress URL setting in the Setting -> General -> WordPress address (URL) ->change into http://www.fatihsyuhud.com.

The last step, I use Redirection Plugins to force the change and redirect all previous URLs  from non-www into www as advised by Google Webmaster Tools. This step is called a 301 redirect to tell the search engines that the site or page has moved permanently to a new URL, this way all previous pages links which were indexed by Google will not be broken and will be redirected to the new links instead .

All was done yesterday. And today I am surprised to find out my Google PR is back to 5! I hope it will never go down again.

***

Ads which violate Google Webmaster guidelines are:

• Text links ads
• Paid review
• Personal ads – ads in which advertiser communicate directly with you.

Solution, you may still put a personal ads provided you put a “rel=”nofollow” attribute.

Further reading:

• Google webmaster guidelines for general guide
• Reunifying Duplicate content a good advice from the Official Google Webmaster team on duplicate content within the same website / blog

Because the easiest way to redirect pages, if you run a self-hosted wordpress-powered blog, is by installing redirection plugins. You can make redirection activities automatic and fun!

The main goal of this redirection is to hide an affiliate links from Google’s eyes so that your blog is not considered as a paid-linking blog which in turn will get banned, or at least will get your Google PR drops down.

Plugins Data

Name of plugins: Redirection Plugins
Author: John Godley
Download: Download the plugins here (zip file).

Features:

* Supports both WordPress-based and Apache-based redirections
* 404 error monitoring – captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects
* RSS feed for 404 errors
* Custom ‘pass-through’ redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
* Full logs for all redirected URLs
* Create redirections based upon a URL, browser, referring site, or login status
* Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes
* Full regular expression support
* Fully localized
* Export all redirections to CSV, XML, or Apache .htaccess files
* Import Apache .htacces files

How to use it to hide / redirect affiliate links

Suppose I want to make a redirection of my CO.CC affiliate program (http://www.co.cc/?id=147405), here’s what I’ll do:

1. Once the plugins is activated, go to -> Tools -> Redirection. The plugins admin is there.
2. In the Add New Redirection, there’s two boxes you have to fill out:
Box 1: Source URL. It’s the redirection link. It’s a virtual link, so it does NOT exist. You can make whatever links you want.
Example: http://fatihsyuhud.com/go/co.cc

Box 2: Target URL. It’s the real affiliate links
Example: http://www.co.cc/?id=147405

3. Click “Add Redirection”.
4. Done. Now you have redirection links to show in your blog’s sidebar i.e. http://fatihsyuhud.com/go/cc.cc. See the example in my own sidebar.

See the picture

Picture 1: Two columns you have to fill out for pages redirection

Picture 2: Sample how to fill out the two columns