Forum Moderators: skibum
Option 2: link
www.mysite.com/ref.php?ref=001
goes to my "ref" script which sets up cookie and then redirects (301, permanent) to my index page.
Which option is better? I would appreciate any help.
But frankly you shouldn't be thinking about your affiliate program in terms of PR anyway.
[webmasterworld.com...]
[webmasterworld.com...]
1. Tell your affiliate to put a text file in a directory, so that all links from that site to your site will be in a subdirectory of that directory. For example, if they will link from www.theirsite.com/widgets/blue and ...widgets/red than they should place it in the widgets directory.
The text file should include their user name.
This will ensure that they are the owners of that website, it will allow both webmasters using their own domain and people with geocities etc. pages to set up an affiliate program.
2. Tell them to set up an account using the user name in the file. Have them leave the url of the text file.
3. Then look at the refferals and check that they come from a directory below or on the same level in the hierarchy as the text file.
You could also reverse the first two steps (now that I think about it it would actually work better.)
This will pass the pr, allow for dmoz listings, and it won't scare the users (some of them hate affiliate urls.)
As for competing with your affiliate sites, that's silly in my opinion. Affiliate sites are always competing with you in search engine results. The reason you want affiliate sites is because some of them are better seo's, some provide a service that is somewhat different than your site and might have better conversion rates, and of course (and this is the most important reason) even if you got rid of your affiliate program they would still compete with you, they would just send all the traffic to your competition.
If you are finding it difficult to convince affiliate sites to join your program, increase the payout. This might make sense since you would also be paying for pr (and their pr is often proportional to the amount of traffic they send you.)
This would also solve the problem of spam, adwords and overture campaings competing with yours, etc.
voodoo
It seemed to me that all they were concerned with was using their affiliate partners to promote their own site without giving me any credit.
I think your affiliates will soon become dissilusioned if this is your strategy. (affiliates aren't stupid).
aek.
Also, it prevents your affiliates from promoting your links in email.
aek, if your affiliate partner changed their links to this method, that might explain the drop in conversion (drop in tracking, actually) And I think you're right that affiliates would catch on to this behavior. After all, changing your linking to give you PR also takes theirs away.
lukasz, the consensus around here is that a 301 redirect will pass on PR. So Option 2 may be the best.
Option 1 will result in what appears to G as many, many duplicate pages.
Ooops, just checked those links, evidently I'm not the only one who has ethical concerns about it. It seems like you are trying to have your cake and eat it too. If you want PR from links, pay them for the link, not for sales.
If you want to get PR from your affiliates, pay them for what you get, the PR boost. Either pay them on a CPM basis or pay them for the link (thats what you're trying to get any way). Dont tie their revenue to sales if what youre really getting from them is the PR.
Im sure it could be put much more eloquently by somebody else but thats the basic gist of it.
If it's a reporting problem, then that's a different subject.
A site could give you a PR of 6 and not generate a sale? If you read the original paper by Page and Brin, you'll notice that page rank in its original form calculated the probablity of users ending up on a particular page. It obviously wasn't a very exact calculation, since the choice to click on a link is non-random and users start browsing at a non-random page. Still, my point is, unless we are talking about cloaking, hidden or perhaps simply irrelevant links, a site that gives you PR 6 will also give you a lot of traffic. Why would a (commercial) site give you traffic when it wasn't getting anything in return? How is that any less of a problem then transferring PR?
Also, as I said, there is a very strong correlation between traffic and PR. Which in turn means that if you do a good job of converting the traffic you send to your merchants into sales, you are also converting PR into sales. And since pr is worth something to a merchant, and most would be willing to pay for it, why not sell it?
Of course, you could seperate the two. If you don't use traffic to evaluate the PR, what do you use? The toolbar? Not very reliable, and what happens when that feature disappears? There is also another 'pr' problem. PR as in public relations. Google would fight any appearance of PR being traded for money, they marketed page rank quite a bit, it is well known, and even if it's importance in the SERPS calculation has declined, it's public relations value is still high. If PR is never mentioned Google doesn't have a potential public relations problem.
Now, about the referal info not appearing in logs. If that is true, then that would be a problem, but this should be tested. Referer won't normally appear when the address is typed into the address bar, or when a page has been added to favorites. This is unlikely to be completly random, you'd have to check what versions of IE are affected, ip's, what os, isp's etc. If referers are unreliable, there are other ways, such as merchant and affiliate servers comunicating directly.
I am convinced of one thing. Affiliate codes have got to go. Users don't understand what affiliate programs are.
There are basically three types of paid links:
1. pay per impression (cpm)
2. pay per click (cpc)
3. pay per sale (affiliates)
Technicaly there is no difference between the three other than the fact that as you go down the list the responsibility for the management of the advertising campaign is shifted from the merchant to the 'publisher.' However this shift had a significant impact on the way affiliate programs are perceived by the general public. In the case of cpm and cpc campaings, merchants pre-screened the publishers to ensure a high roi. High quality publishers clearly marked paid links as advertisments. Lack of such pre-screening meant that eventually web surfers started associating affiliate programs with low quality sites, scam sites, sites that try to appear to be the original and get a better position through seo trickery, and sites that don't clearly identify paid links as advertisments (while at the same time giving the surfer the means to discover the dishonesty by looking at the link in the status bar.)
Merchants and other paid sites will not go back to pre-screening, it makes no sense for them. There is only one way to solve this problem, make it impossible for a web surfer to tell that he is dealing with an affiliate (as opposed to any other form of paid link.) This way he will have to go back to judging a site by its merits rather then relying on the stereotype.
Merchants don't compete with their affiliates? Lets first define what we are talking about. What I meant by 'competition' is that merchants and paid sites are trying to increase their exposure, build up their brand, and create an association between the kind of service they provide and their web site. This not only increases traffic because web surfers will go directly to the site the next time they want something, and are also more likely to click on a link if they recognize and trust the brand. That trust also increases the conversion rates once they do end up at the merchant's site. This also means that affiliates will have a more difficult time getting traffic from search engines. Sites with a recognizable brand will rank highly, and vice versa, ranking highly helps in building your brand.
So in that sense, yes, advertisers are competing with publishers, at least for those web surfers which are at that moment looking for the services or products offered by the advertisers.
voodoo
ps. czesc lukasz
