Can a domain recover from a penalty over time?

I wrote a post last year saying that aaronchua.com is no more because it seems to be under a penalty. I drew this conclusion based on (i) it has lost its sitelinks and (ii) it has lost rankings for many of its keywords.  After a year of non activity, I was surprised that this penalty seems to be lifted by itself. If you do a search for aaronchua.com, you can see that it has regained back its sitelinks.

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Hence, I decided to continue blogging here again. No point wasting an aged domain that has real content on it in case I need to channel its PR to a new site. More importantly, I have learned quite a bit during the past year and this is a good place to share some of these lessons and insights. 

How to make an Amazon niche site for 2014 and beyond

I never quite making amazon niche sites. However, these site look very different from the first batch that I made last year during the 50 Amazon site challenge.  Most of the these early sites were filled with buying keywords. The articles were mainly concerned with terms such as 'best product', 'product review', product under XX dollars" etc. These kind of articles do bring in buying traffic that converts very well but the problem they create is making your whole site looks like a spammy site, regardless how good your articles are. 

Since then, my affiliate sites have gotten a lot more diversify. Each of them now has an information and an product review component. The informational aspect has no monetisation embedded and their purpose is to serve the user which hopefully can attract some real links which can be channeled to the product review page through onsite linking.  I found this model to be working very well and most of my sites do receive natural links from search traffic visitors who found them useful. 

Is building links necessary to get search traffic?

None of my affiliate links have gotten into any penalities. One of the reason is that I don't build any links to them. None what so ever.  I focus on identifying a good niche and focus on writing all the content to answer the problems for that niche. It works very well and my sites can gather search traffic in a matter of months with no manipulative linking on my part. Below is a screenshot for one of new sites that was built in May this year.

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Sorry I can't reveal the site at the moment but I might do so when it gets a bit stronger as a public case study. The bigger point here is that you don't need links to get search engine traffic, especially in 2013. Google has been ruthless in rolling out their algorithm updates and it actually makes it easier for proper sites to have a shot at claiming the first page for many keywords.

Conclusion

This site proves that some domains do recover over time especially if you know you have not done anything that might trigger a penalty. Sometime, you just have to let the search engine sort itself out and hope for the best.

It feels good to blog here again and I will be writing some stuff that you guys who still want to make some money online will appreciate.

Posted in: How to make money with amazon