Forum Moderators: skibum
Ive developed my own affilliate program, where affiliates can forward to my store via a http request parameter (affiliateid=xyz)
Now im wondering, each affiliate will try to spread the link out as much as possible (besides advertising on their own site), so it will end up on forums, groups, etc.
What happens when the search engine index the links and start showing them on search result pages? Then the affiliates will be earning money for "free".
Whats the best way to combat this? Change their affiliate id every 3 months? Doesnt seem like a good idea as large websites then have to go thru the hassle of changing all their links.
input is appreciated. Thanks in advnace.
There is a common misconception that affiliates steal sales that companies would have otherwise gotten. In a program I manage we were requested to restrict affiliates from bidding on terms using the companies trademark. Affiliate are making more than 50% of the online sales. If the merchant allowed them to co-bid on trademark terms he would experience more sales. Instead, his competitors are bidding on his trademark and have 90% of the listing.
The problem I see with this, is the payout model we are running. We pay a certaing percentage depending on the amount of sales done in a single month.
By getting "free" payouts, they might get bumped up to higher payment percentage.
Id like more input on this. How does other affiliate programs handle this issue? Is it common to give them "free" sales? Would be good to listen from affiliate program owners as well as the participants.
Thanks in advance.
By getting "free" payouts, they might get bumped up to higher payment percentage.Id like more input on this. How does other affiliate programs handle this issue? Is it common to give them "free" sales? Would be good to listen from affiliate program owners as well as the participants.
As the posters above said there are no "free" payouts or sales. If they get url, which points to your store, indexed and ranked in SERPs it's due to their work (not free). Look at it this way, as one of the examples - if your affiliate puts a link on their site to your store, and their site ranks high (has authority, etc.), your product will have visibility in SERPs. By same toking even if your affiliate puts a link in the forum, he still did work and provided viability to your product...especially if he/she is an active and respected member of the said forum community (their recommendation will weigh much higher then if you just went to the forum and in first couple of posts promoted your product. Being part of the community and building trust and authority takes time - and here I am talking about genuine community member not a 'faker' who tries to build number of posts just in order to drop a link and later date - those people you can spot mile away....)
On a seperate note, if you stay on the path of not wanting to pay out for your affiliates "free" work, then guess what, your affiliate will simply switch links to your competitor and make sales for them while his site is still ranking for all the good keywords.
It's best to keep good affiliates happy as it's hard to get good affiliates, so if you don't take care of them, they'll go to someone who will take care of them :).
>>By getting "free" payouts, they might get bumped up to higher payment percentage.
Why would this be a problem anyway? If it wasn't for this affiliates hard work, you wouldn't be making anything from their work.....
Disallow your affiliate pages to indexed in search engines using noindex robots tag and robots.txt file.
So none of your affiliate can get any SE traffic to thier affiliate URL and no sale. So you don't need to pay any money to them.
FYI, I certainly made some money "back in the day" when Google indexed my sites, followed my affiliate links, and then included those links as the URL for the merchant's pages. However, that stopped happening a few years ago, pretty much "across the board" for all the affiliate programs and affiliate networks. I think that Google "figures out" which parameters aren't relevant, or perhaps uses the shortest and simplest link when it finds the same content page under multiple URL variations.
But as others have noted, why not do your best job at organic SEO, and then let your affiliates do what they can?
