Forum Moderators: skibum
I am the webmaster for a niche retail web site. I've noticed in the past 6 months that affiliates have aggressively pushed our affiliate program through google SEO. I also noticed that some may be using spamming techniques.
So for certain keywords, we have multiple top 10 listings, under different affiliate url's. Some of these have unique content and look ok. But others re-direct directly to our home page. The traffic is great, but I don't want our main corporate site to be penalized by google for our affiliates behavior. Are we at risk?
Also, it is nearly impossible to track what all our affiliates are doing since we have 1000's.
B.R.
You should be holding parties!
See "groan under the weight of spam" thread.
It's down to you to monitor that affiliates don't go too much over the line anyway. Google do what they want to do, and you have no say in it anyway. As long as they aren't obvious "Link Farms" There shouldn't be a problem.
Who says doorway pages don't work?
;-)
Also, it is nearly impossible to track what all our affiliates are doing since we have 1000's.
Well that's going to be a pretty lame excuse if google do decide to ban you isn't it?
Get Proactive.
Type Project managment and affiliate mangement in google.
You only have your self to blame.
This may not be 100% for affiliate sites but I wouldn't worry about that first.
One approach would be to encourage even more affiliates and wean your site off of SE traffic all together. Let others take the risks and bring in traffic for you ;) - it's what you're doing in part already right?
Also, TSN made some good points about your responsibility. There's little point in letting affiliates get away with *everything* but if you want the traffic I'd not lay any big restrictions on your INCOME PROVIDERS or you may find you're back to SEO on your own site only ;)
Nick
Those aren't linking, they're redirecting. If competitors catch it and fill out a spam report, it'll be both they report. Will they know it's an affiliate and not the parent company itself doing it? Maybe not, but if there's a hand check, Google will know it.
Is this fact? 100% of the time redirects are used it is viewed as spam?
My thoughts are if the target site is relevent it should be ok, but my thoughts don't mean a hoot.
As far as redirects, I'm sure if the hand check applies the hand checker will see that the redirected site is the parent company and should not be applying a penalty to the parent company. Only the affiliate who is using a redirect should be penalized.
Thanks for your wonderful feedback. It is greatly appreciated. There is some paranoia here in the fourms and learning about being penalized got me paranoid also.
I think we should be fine as google should be smart enough to differentiate the origin of the spam if any affiliates cross the line.
And I think the bottom line is if were are converting well enough for google traffic that multiple affiliates promote us, that means the user had a relevant and valuable search experience.
