Google is one of those companies that like to change the game on affiliates quite often for no apparent reason. One day your site is perfectly in tune with their guidelines, and the other you are banned from the rankings due to some SEO algorithm update.
What to do to make sure that such a situation never happens to your WordPress affiliate site again?
First of all, you should be up-to-date with the most important developments in SEO. But apart from that, it’s also good to have these search engine optimization tips in mind:
Google+ Authorship
A while ago, Google enabled webmasters to display their picture next to their search engine listings. This is meant to make the page visually recognizable and more attractive to the visitor.
Setting this up is quite simple, and can be done in literally 5 minutes.
Start by going to your Google+ profile. Click the “Edit profile” button and scroll to the “Contributor to” section. Add your affiliate blog and click “Save.”
Next, go back to your site, go to your WP profile, and set your Google+ link (pointing to your Google+ profile).
Now the last step, install the WordPress SEO plugin. Go to the section Titles & Metas > Home, and scroll to “Author metadata.” This is where you get to set the default WP user that’s going to be used for Google+ authorship.
At this point, you are good to go.
Other SEO Settings
The WordPress SEO plugin is probably the best SEO plugin currently available. Apart from Google+ authorship, it can help your affiliate blog in many other ways.
The best overall strategy to make your blog follow the best SEO practices is to always keep the plugin updated, and (if you’re not an SEO expert yourself) stick to the default settings.
Now, there are still some things you need to set up to allow the plugin to do its magic. The first thing is the aforementioned Google+ authorship.
Also, don’t forget to set your site’s main title and description (section Titles & Metas > Home).
Next, go to the Social section, and connect your social media profiles and pages.
Disavow Tool
In short, link building is basically the core of SEO. However, not all links are good links. Some “bad neighborhood” links can hurt your site instead of making it stronger. And since most of the time you don’t have any control over how other people link to your site, Google has released the Disavow Tool.
This tool allows you to disavow all links that you consider being hurtful. Everything is available trough Google Webmaster Tools (you need to have an account there to use the tool).
Finally, remember to monitor your stats and your rank, to make sure that the tweaks you’re introducing have positive impact on your SEO.