April 1, 2005 Template Monster announced with their affiliates that TemplateMonster.com was banned from Google and it was not a joke at all. Here’s the letter I got on Friday:

We’re contacting you with bad news: our website, www.TemplateMonster.com, has recently been banned by Google search engine.

We have no idea how this could happen, but one of the reasons could be so-called “duplicate content penalty” caused by our ready-made affiliate shops.

The point is that there are thousands of our affiliate shops in the Internet, and 90% of them have the same content and the same direct link to the Template Monster website. So Google could consider that we create numerous sites in order to increase our link popularity and pagerank.

We’re trying to restore our existence in Google, and one of the steps we are taking is to get rid of the unnatural links (including links from affiliate shops).

Thereupon, we ask you to do the following:

Remove the direct link or change it with your affiliate link, or if you don’t know how to do this, simply download the updated affiliate shop from your affiliate account:
https://secure.mytemplatestorage.com/personal/sample-shops/

Thank you for understanding.

Best regards,
Support Team
www.MyTemplateStorage.com

Now the problem is discussed all over the Web… just try Google for ‘Template Monster banned by Google’

Though it was only Template Monster’s assumption that they were banned for creating numerous sites with duplicate content (affiliate shops) now it seems to be the only version as Google still keeps silence on the real reasons.