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I clicked on the link, it goes to my company's website directly with affilate ID attached in the URL. I've already reported to Google but nothing! What do you guys recon?
Could you change the Terms and Conditions of your affiliate program and forbid whatever mechanism this person is using to drive visitors to your site.
Email all your affiliates with sufficient notice of the change (whatever your current T&C say about changing them), and as soon as the time is up nullify this persons affiliate tracking code.
Make sure you still get the hit of course, but don't credit their affiliate account after the notice period.
You should let the affiliate know how you feel, maybe next week he sends the traffic to your competition.
The affiliate is just doing their job -- and it just so happens to be a bit better than the site itself is doing.
We often see merchants who aren't as adept at SEO as some of their affiliates. I do think the redirect is a little underhanded. I know, for instance, that doing so violates the Amazon TOS.
As far as Gooogle is concerned, I would guess that the question is whether the redirect is deceptive. You might take a look at the chache version of the page in Google just to see.
I'm a web designer & I put links back to me in the footer of pages I make. For a while I was putting refId=clientName on the end of the link so I could tell which click throughs where doing what (I later learned this was pointless as I could just use the domain name).
Anyway after doing this for a while my site (the target of these links) appeared in Google with the url [mydomain.com...]
Hmmm, strange. After the next update some other new sites had been included in the index. My results in Google changed to [mydomain.com...]
After watching this for a while my conclusion was that Google follows a bunch of links to my site, it notices that although the url are slightly different the content is the same, it presents the link that was most recently added to its index in the SERPs.
Could this be the same as what has happened to you? Maybe the affiliate is not so evil after all?
Actually paying commission is not the Point, the point is they are using a redirect approach from their site that shows our website when their link is clicked on.
For the past 6 months we ranked #4 in the Google Search engine, aut this week we still hold that position but the URL displayed shows the affiliate web URL, and when if a Searcher clicks on the URL it leads to our website with the affiliate ID that belongs to this affiliate.
It seems like this affiliate didn't do anything at all except setting their domain and pointing to my site, not even create their own new site.
Paying commission is not a big deal since we are willing to pay to affiliate who drive traffic to us, but in this case...I'm just curious of how did it happen.
most likely his domain is pointing to yours... It would be impossible for him to get a really high spot in the rankings without some good PR
But yet you've already filed a google spam complaint.
That's what some crazy merchants don't seem to understand. You start an affiliate program and then complain when one of your affiliates outranks you on these common generic terms.
They want the supers, then complain when they get them.
Pay up pay up, Do yer SEO skills or change your ranking code if you wanna avoid that.
The fact that Google picked up someone's affiliate link to show in the search results for a certain term does NOT mean the affiliate is doing anything unethical. I've seen it before with Commission Junction links and also independent merchant affiliate links, and it seems to be related to the anchor text that the affiliate has used in their link to the merchant. (The affiliate's PR is likely part of the mix too, but I'm on a Mac so can't check that.)
The way to deal with it is not to squash your affiliate, it's to polish your own SEO. Focus on getting/building more links to your main URL with anchor text that includes the most important term(s) where the affiliate is outranking you. It could be as simple as changing some of your internal site links to say something like "Blue Widgets Home" instead of just "Home". If need be, change to text links instead of graphics to achieve this.
If your terms of service reserve the right for you to approve or disapprove how the affiliate links to you, you could maybe ask the affiliate to change the anchor text in their link to you, but be careful of that because you might just be moving the situation to a different term.
The affiliate created domain ABC.com and pointed it to Cyclob site.
Sooo, when a crawler comes along it will use Cyclob site and pagerank. Cyclob site could be banned for using doorway/duplicate sites to drive traffic..?
Surely that is illegal...?
When I join affiliate programs I do what I can do to gain top placement to get the most commission from the sells. You can if you like drop the person if you want, but id be cautious of how things go from there. I have a high PR site, if i link to your affiliate with my ID and im better ranked and more site likes to the affiliate than your site alone I may obtain top placement.
I run a topsites program, you type in the keywords and many of the people who joined their affiliate URL shows up at the top replacing my listing.
It's the "variant URL" problem with an extra layer in it, and that extra layer makes me a lot more sympathetic to the merchant.
It would depend on the merchant's terms of service -- update them if needed -- but the merchant should be within their rights to ask the affiliate to remove the redirect from the domain. It would be perfectly fair to require the affiliate to make a regular page on that domain, with a regular link, no redirect. The affilate could of course optimize it to rank well for the search term of their choice. That way if the affiliate made it into the top ten they would be doing it on the strength of their own content, and even if they outranked the merchant, they wouldn't be totally displacing the merchant.
www . example.com/index.php?=affiliateID has same content as www . example.com but in the SERPs www . example.com/index.php?=affiliateID ranks higher.
Solution: Now use a redirect page such as partner.php so your affiliate link will be www . example.com/partner.php?=affiliateID
And most important insert these in the meta of partner.php
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex">
None of your affiliates will get free clicks from google or anyother SE. Difficult part is the affiliates should update the links quickly enough. IMHO give them the updated links and deactive the current links i.e. Here are the new links pls update / no commision will be paid on old links :-)
If index.php is set as default for the root domain then you will end up removing your own site from the SE database.
This way your page gets indexed, but the same page served to Googlebot with query string in the URL not.
Whether this is SPAM or not is another discussion. Whether this is a good thing for you or a bad thing for you goes without saying. Take the sales and profits any way you can get them. And be grateful for aggressive and creative affiliates.
