Affiliate Sites

[otnot]

I have noticed that some sites are using affiliate programs and in the process have opened them selves up to doorway pages and redirects ect. Is this spam?

[Canary]

I would not have thought it would be the company offering the affiliate link that would be classed as the spammer.

If someone creates a doorway page stuffed with keywords on their site just for linking to an affiliate site then that site is more likely to be penalised for spamming surely than the site that it links too - IMO.

[otnot]

Hi Canary:
I think that if your willing to pay somone to advertise for you without placing some rules for them to follow that your the one that is resposible for the spamming not the offendning site.

[dwilson]

And what if they don't follow your rules? One well-known company has 900,000 affiliates. There's no way the company checks up on all of them. And there's no way that all of them are ethical in their SEO.

[otnot]

You should look at who your getting in bed with or you might be suprised in the morning.

[CosmicDan]

Think about it...

If I could put up a hundred spam pages that pointed to a site, and that resulted in the site itself being penalized, it would be a spammers dream!

I could wipe out the competition in a month just by "supporting" them with spam pages. There would be a reverse-spam assult on the competition insead of a spam assult for better ratings.

If Google let even a whiff of this kind of bad-thinking into their logic, it would completely upset the validity of their entire site and start the most bizarre spam wars ever.

[otnot]

As a buisness owner I am responsible for my reputation and image. By allowing just anybody to advertise or sell your products without following up on how they are representing your company is very foolish on my part. Thus I should be held accountable for my lack of integrity. I have had competitors steal my content and post identical sites in an attempt to get me banned for spamming. My point is where does the line in the sand get drawn on spam? Isn't affiliate programs a form of spamming?

[rogerd]

Affiliate programs aren't spam, but they can certainly encourage spammers. I have sites that are Amazon affiliates, and the links take the form of an affiliate link on the page of an original book review by a topic expert, written just for our site. Nothing spammy there. But that same site gets tons of link requests from no-content junk sites built just around affiliate links. We also see forum spammers dropping affiliate links, and of course e-mail spam is heavily affiliate oriented.

It's tough to police every action of every affiliate, but any affilate program sponsor needs a contract that prohibits spam activities and that states the affiliate will lose any accrued commissions if such activities are discovered. It won't eliminate spam, but it may send spammers onto easier targets.

[Hollywood]

Rogerd

I agree, you need to be careful out there, if you need assitance... this is a great link for the reporting of spam or a list of those sites that have the spam reporting link avilable.

[webpublicitee.com...]

All best

[toddb]

Google in looking out for its interest also could hardly ban every program that had an affiliate go bad. The thinking that if a smaller search engine using adwords put up a redirect and then Google might have to ban itself for the offense, does not seem reasonable to me.

[otnot]

It's not even that these affilate sites are affecting my ranking. This morning I was doing some research for a KW and came across an affiliate campaign gone bad. They had 4950 sites that had state and city specific urls and took up 3 pages of results. I agree that affiliate sites if done correctly is not spamm. But it tends to lead people to the temptation to cheat. Back to my main point. The parent company is ultimately resonsible for any action taken on it's behalf. If a company produces let's say cars, and one of it's subsiduaries misrepresents the parent company with false advertizing and gets sued. An attorney will go after the money, and that lays ultimately with the parent company. Sure the subsiduary will get the first hit but the parent company will get the last. And I don't care how many layers you put between your self and a act that is done in your behalf, you still will be found in the wrong. And that to me what is happening with affiliate sites. The parent company is not beig held responsible.I know that Google can't possibly catch all the spammers and we can't possilbly report them all. So what is the sense in being legitimate? I guess if there is money involved there will always be someone trying to cheat to get more of it. Sorry about venting my frustrations about dishonest people.

[otnot]

I guess I will just hire a bunch of spamming affiliates and not worry about any consiquences.