Confused and on High Alert - what's happening?

For the weight loss site do you promote clickbank products? If you do you have been google slapped as google is not ranking any weight loss sites that use click bank products.

Hope this helps.

First I would not be too concerned with the links aspect so much. For I use googles webmaster tools on all of my sites and every now and again all of my links disapear with in this tool. My guess would be that google is doing an update on your sites. Which is in turn making it seem like you have less links then you actually do which would also cause the drop in pr.

Keep in mind as well to that if you have not been steadily promoting the sites and or adding fresh new content. Google may just be thinking the site is worthless and not worth giving good pr to it. So make sure you are adding new content as much as possible and continueally building links to your site.

What I think I would do in your situation since this is so fresh. I would go and add a single piece of content right now to both sites. Then head out to pingler, ipingit, ping goat, ping my blog and ping o matic. I would also make sure to use only wire on these new content pieces. Now with as many links as you are going to get from this in such a short amount of time. It is going to tell googles bot that it may have messed up and once again you should be back with all the original links and pr.

I was an affiliate to one of these products on clickbank and they emailed me this during the week. So I guess removing these banners and maybe offer something for free to get them on your list then email market these product might be the better way to go.

1. Google slap update:

We've had various contacts who were able to talk to managers at google about all of the fitness sites that are "google slapped" (which means that all of those domains have severe quality score penalties on them, so that it's essentially impossible to even get 1 single click from your ads)... it's basically a total "banning" of a domain.

Unfortunately, google has made the decision to ban practically all fitness and fat loss sites on the market currently (at least all clickbank sites and most other fitness sites too)

Negotiations have not gone far as even when we've made requested changes that google asked for, our sites would get "re-slapped" within 24-48 hours after 1 manager lifted the "google slap", but another google employee would "re-slap" the site after they saw it running again.

The only thing I've seen working at least on a small scale is affiliates that have their own domains with their own content built on those domains. Some domains are not google slapped yet, and if you're lucky, you can get some google traffic (at least for some time period) if your site doesn't get targeted for a google slap.

FYI - masked domains DON'T work on google any longer... years ago, masked domains would apparently work even if a main domain got slapped, but this no longer works from word on the street.

Another alternative -- although the traffic isn't as big as google, try to run campaigns on BING/yahoo and see what kind of results you can get. I've also heard that you need to use your own domain to run ads on BING as direct hoplinks are not being accepted. That info is a couple months old though, so I'm not sure if any changes to that policy have taken place.

If I find out any more info about google, I will send updates. As for now, it's still not looking good though for adwords and fitness sites... I'd recommend focusing on SEO, social network traffic, and other forms of organic traffic.

Also, one of the most profitable methods that is drastically under-utilized is buying textlinks and banners directly from websites. This takes some negotiation with the site owners many times, but it is WAY more profitable than most ppc networks.