Good question. Leave Google to figure out what the web pages are about since it's their core business. As an affiliate it should have been my job to bring people and products together. Not Google and websites together. I made the wrong move by matching keywords to search and not content to people. Lesson learned.

That is interesting! I always viewed it as helping Google bring you people to your websites where you can connect them with your products, helping your content stand out by using the keywords people search for. Are you saying you overoptimized on SEO and underdelivered on content? (Just curious! I'd love to learn more)

Yeah. Listen to Kyle and Carson about SEO. (Jays summer of link building wabinar too.). It's signals that Google seems to be picking up on. FB likes, tweets, + 1s, your comments, your reach, who is linking into you and you're linking too. I should have seen from all those sites that they weren't getting any activity from users. Plenty of traffic from Google but nothing happening from the users being sent to the sites. So under delivering on content, I'd guess I'll be guilty as charged, as there were a few sites getting thousands of hits and no engagement with readers. That's just wrong!

On site stuff. When you have your keyword in the title, the URL, categories, tags, image alt attributes, your internal link titles etc. Some aren't apparent to people reading the content (like the alt attribute to your images), but when googlebots crawl a site, I guess it's going to be really keyword heavy. Then factor in the keyword anchor text from the off site stuff.

I guess that could be fall into the over optimization area.

Like I say, stick with these guys to learn all the kinks of this biz and stay away from SEO courses that give blueprints on how to rank. They can work but it's a sore hit when you get canned for it.

The site I'm building out slowly now is laryngitishomeremedies [org]. If you look at that site, you'll see how I'm trying to build it out without going heavy on backlinks.

Instead on each of the posts, I'm trying to encourage people to like, tweet, + 1, pin the images if that's what they prefer, and/or rate the content.

The site is still in its infancy and all I want to do is load it up with content that people are going to find useful. (hopefully). AdSense is a no go and there's only one product I see about it. I'm going to stick with this little site and blog on it whenever I have a bit of time on my hands.

I'm only focusing on content at the moment. Google is sending some traffic from the current #7 position it is I think? I'm not advertising on it though until there's enough people finding it and before I market it, I want to be confident that is worth while attracting people to the site.

The de-indexing of my sites wasn't solely to do with over optimizing. PPG explained it to me about AdSense. I run an auction with Flippa for one of them with live ads and she reckoned it's someone that click bombed it. That would have alerted Googles fraud squad, they'll have looked at my accounts and noticed the amount of sites, probably the keyword rich domains, the affiliate programs, the made for AdSense sites and just stopped investigating at some point, closed the case and annihilated every site I had.

Not to worry, I'll plod along and be back eventually. Thought I'd have heard back from Kyle or Carson before I went. Maybe their off playing golf.

Will do Veronica and all the best with your local marketing. Stick with it.

Thanks Josh. A saying from Kyle is sticking in my mind. Failure is a part of success. Just gotta learn from the mistakes, keep the chin up and keep plodding along. See ya when i get back.

Hi Dean, Hoping 6 months should get things done. See ya then.