Forum Moderators: skibum
[edited by: engine at 10:42 am (utc) on Mar. 30, 2006]
If this is the case, what's the problem? Your company now techically occupies positions 1 and 2 for that particular search.
arran.
its not that cut and dry. It's looks as though MSN algo is the problem. Sticky me for details if you like.
Instead of manually denying sales, it would probably be more efficient to change the code on the landing page(s) to not set a cookie if the referrer includes msn.*, yahoo.*, google.*, etc. (you'll want to block the country specific iste google.ca, google.fr, etc. as well as google.com).
This is what we did. We also periodically check the referral logs to see if any other directories/search engines have picked up affiliate links then add those sites to the filter list.
Just search the referrer string for a list of search engines (like "google." and "yahoo."). If you don't get any hits, set the cookie or do whatever you normally do for tracking. If you do get a hit, don't set the cookie (or whateve).
As an alternative, you can always just use an allow list. Instead of searching against a list of search engines, search against a list of approved affiliate domains. If the referrer comes from a vvalid affiliate domain, set the tracking, otherwise treat as a "natural" visitor.
If I was an affiliate of your, I would drop you so fast. I can not believe you penalize an affiliate for ranking higher than you. I good business person would be happy and encourage it.
The filtering issue that I wrote about is not when affiliatesite.com is ranking higher than mydomain.com. The filtering issue comes into play when mydomain.com?AffiliateID=1 is showing up in the search engines. If for some reason mydomain.com?AffiliateID=1 is showing in the SERPs, we are not going to pay commissions when people click on that link in the search engines. We will only pay commission when someone clicks on that link coming from an affiliate site.
why don't you add NOINDEX tag on such affiliate pages?
I do, it was happening several months ago, was reported to them, and seemed to have stopped. So I've seen those links, they are not click referrals from affiliate sites, nor are they PPC clicks - it's an MSN Search BUG.
Pardon, but even doing affiliate work myself, I realize that the merchant can allow or disallow clicks from certain sites, or insist that links only be put on sites that he/she has approved. If the clicks are not coming from the affiliate's website (which they aren't) then it's a moot issue. The affiliate is NOT sending that traffic, MSN is sending the traffic because of a glitch, and MSN is not an affiliate of that merchant.
If this keeps happening, then merchants should definitely add a provision in their Affiliate Terms of Service that ONLY clicks from approved websites or sites owned and/or controlled by their affiliates are commissionable are commissionable.
Thanks for clearing that up! You both understand exactly whats goin on. I couldnt describe it as well as you did but just goes to show you how much work MSN has in developing their search!
Why? Because the link is on an affiliate site and we have no control over how they structure their links.
Because you don't want to see that affiliate link in search engines.
Why? Because the link is on an affiliate site and we have no control over how they structure their links.
Because you don't want to see that affiliate link in search engines.
Do you have the ability to put a link to your site on amazon.com? No. Neither do we have the ability to modify a link on an affiliate's site.
I would think that you could come to a compromise to keep the lucky affiliate happy, especially if he was making sales before this issue arose.
------------------------------
Definitions
d. "Affiliate Site" shall be defined as the website or Internet site that the Affiliate Member operates.
Links: ... You may place the link on any page of your site, except as specified by us.
Referral Fees: ... For a sale to be eligible to earn a referral fee, the customer must click-through a special Link from your site to our site and register for the product or service.
------------------------------
So as you can see, we specify that the customer must follow the link from the Affiliate's site. The Agreement had this wording from the begining, long before the issue ever came up with affiliate links being included on SERPs.
Actually, for one particular affiliate, we DID pay commissions on the transactions made before we caught the problem. As they are a good affiliate, we didn't back the amounts out after we caught the problem.
Also good job on paying the one affiliate that benefitted from the SERP's. You probably got some goodwill out of it and hopefully that affiliate recommended your program to some of his affiliate friends.
Sigh. Read my lips: we have no control over the exact link an affiliate places on their site, so it is impossible for us to add a NOFOLLOW tag to the link!Do you have the ability to put a link to your site on amazon.com? No. Neither do we have the ability to modify a link on an affiliate's site.
We both are talking about two different things. I was talking about YOUR site and NOT your affiliate's site.
I was talking about adding NOINDEX meta tag on 'Affiliate Link'.
Example: yoursite.com/somepage.php?affid=WebmasterWorld
This page would be located on your site and hence you can control it. You can easily see if the variable 'affid' exist and add NOINDEX meta tag dynamically to that page content. If there is NO 'affid', means the page URL is yoursite.com/somepage.php then don't add NOINDEX meta tag. So search engines will index your pages (eg: yoursite.com/somepage.php) but ignore your affiliate links (eg: yoursite.com/somepage.php?affid=WebmasterWorld)
HTH.
I posed this problem to a panel of experts at the last pubcon in Vegas and none of the experts had a solution. I believe the best approach for this would be the script to not set the cookie from search referrals.
I'm not sure why I didn't think of it before!
talismon,
We first saw it a few years ago.
I know most merchants do not allow affiliates to bid on trademarks with Adwords and Overture. *NOW* a whining merchant comes along that does not like the fact that one of their affiliates is doing better in natural search engine results. (Waaaaah! Waaaaah! Its a b-u-g!)
Tell me, do you have in-house sales staff? Do you try to cheat your in-house sales staff out of sales commissions also?
I hope your business drops dead like a rock.
:mad:
does not like the fact that one of their affiliates is doing better in natural search engine results
(To me, it doesn't matter if the affiliate link listing is higher or lower.)
It's not an issue of "stealing" sales (discussed and answered already), but of losing a position on the SERPs. As mysite.com?AffiliateID=AFFID goes to the exact same page as mysite.com, there is no value for the user. Much better that the user find an additional, relevant page, like mysite.cim/widgets.html instead of mysite.com?AffiliateID=AFFID.
Also, since mysite.com?AffiliateID=AFFID and mysite.com are identical pages, there's the duplicate content issue.
In regards to the issue that some people keep trying to make this thread (i.e., affiliatesite.com ranking above myseit.com), I don't have a problem with that. If they've done a better job of SEO than I have, then they are welcome to the rewards from that.
As it is, none of our affiliates are anywhere near our results for our major keywords. But they may have higher rankings for other keywords that we're not targeting. And I'm fine with that as well.
Ok. So we have serps something like this:-
1.site.com?AffiliateID=AFFID
2.site.com
3.othersite.com (maybe an affiliate with a link on that site)
etc
What if the reason for the site.com?AffiliateID=AFFID is so high because of the link to it. EG (If it was Google) - if a PR9 linked to a page like site.com?AffiliateID=AFFID part of the reason for that page ranking so high is due to the site it is being linked from (eg the affiliate)
However - at the end of the day the page belongs to the merchant, and as mentioned the click is coming from MSN not the affiliate.
Just trying to point out that the high ranking of the page maybe due to the Affiliate :)
