After having relied heavily on search engine optimization to drive traffic to my websites, I'm finding that I'm no longer getting the search engine referrals that I used to get.

I suspect the problem starts with "spam sites", or also known in some circles as "feeder sites". Both Google and Yahoo appear to be Hell-bent on ridding their indexes of spam sites, either eliminating them altogether, or moving them deep down in the SERPs.

I'm not blaming anyone for having published spam sites, because I've published my fair share of these sites too. They're very profitable and easy to build.

But in their zeal to find these websites, search engines are inadvertently punishing the highly useful content sites. Interment.net and CousinConnect.com, two of my highly trafficked websites have seen their traffic nearly slashed in half from March of 2004 to today. All of this loss of traffic appears to be the result of a loss in search engine referrals.

My Google referrals have been reduced by 300% since last March. Yahoo referrals are down by 200%, and same with MSN. Many other websites that refer traffic to my sites have been reduced because they too are seeing huge reductions in traffic.

My friend of mine suggested that we are being penalized for having affiliate links on our websites. I'm tending to think that it's not just having affiliate links, but perhaps too many affiliate links. Interment.net and CousinConnect each have thousands of affiliate text links. The latter actually has about 1 million affiliate text links in all. I think Google and/or Yahoo maybe counting the total number of affiliate links on a website and compares it to the number of webpages, to determine if a website is a spam site. Somehow, my content sites are being counted as "spam sites".

On the other hand, my blog sites are doing well. Albeit, my blog sites are relatively new websites, not even a year old yet. But traffic continues to grow on these sites. Even during the month of December, which historically is a slow month for many of my websites, my blog sites are seeing record highs in traffic.

I'm beginning to believe that the days of relying heavily on search engine referrals are over. It's too difficult to optimize for search engines, because the search engine algorithms have become too complex.

Right now, I'm going to focus more effort into two of my most promising blog sites, DoggieNews.com and GenealogyAndHow.com. Interment.net and CousinConnect are still very high priorities for me. But, I'm also going to put the two blog sites into high priority as well.

I'll keep you posted.