Google penalty or simply the site drop - it's almost the same. Your affiliate site may lose rankings and traffic one day. But in fact, it happens gradually - for some time. If you see the site drop during 7-14 days, the new Google Update is happening. Anyway - you can suffer from a manual or algorithmic penalty.
The scenarios for recovery are almost the same - you need to identify the reason for your website drop and get rid of the penalty. It's almost impossible for the affiliate site to eliminate the manual penalty. But in most cases, it all amounts to the Algo Update.
21-Points checklist:
02:46 21-Points Checklist of actions 02:54 1. Check reports in Google Webmaster Tools 03:23 2. Create a disavow file 03:40 3. Check Google Page Speed 03:48 4. Check Core Web Vitals report 03:54 5. Is my site hacked? Clean up 04:23 6. Get rid of user-generated content 04:35 7. Remove low-quality pages, duplicates 04:51 8. Check internal SEO 04:59 9. Back to the old design and site structure 05:09 10. Check your website sitemap 05:18 11. Get your E-A-T work done 05:38 12. Hide your afiliate links in redirects 05:52 13. Don't fall into the category of YMYL websites 06:35 14. Check important backlinks 06:47 15. Avoid over-optimizing your site 06:54 16. Remove outbound links from pages 07:06 17. Improve bounce rate 07:29 18. Snippets CTR 07:34 19. Google Algorythm Update 07:56 20. Check all 301 redirects 08:07 21. Manual/authomatic Google penalties
In this 21 points checklist, I have revealed the whole work that needs to be done for the successful recovery of your affiliate site. I manage 30 websites these days, and I have spent so much time learning the basics of website recovery in Google. You've got new tools to recover, so follow the best practices to bring your site positions and traffic back.
