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Personally, I find these sites very annoying, the real site should be at the top and not the fluff sites.
But is this a spam page of sorts? Shouldn't Google be able to flush these sites out easy?
They're called SEOs, and without them there are many products that people are looking for that they would never be able to find.
A good number of the "real" sites selling products are dog-slow in loading and so poorly designed and search-engine unfriendly that they get buried in rankings and rely on the affiliate sites to a great extent to be able to do business.
>>If you click on a link or image you are taken to the real site, for which the fluff site then gets a percentage if you actually buy something. These site can be a single page..
If people didn't end up buying there would be no commissions and the people would stop building those sites. So the customers find what they want and buy - they win, the companies selling the products win, and the affiliates win. The search engines also win, since people who find what they want will come back and use the search engine again. Everyone wins, including the consumer.
Affiliate marketing is a good thing. There are motivated people helping to sell products to people looking for those products. It's no different from commissioned salespeople finding customers for products they don't manufacture themselves and getting paid for making the sales.
Based on some other threads I have read, the tactics that these folks are using is considered spam by many. I have not seen a good definition of "search engine spam" but it ofter sounds like SEO.
Marcia is bang on the money with what she is saying.
I wont get into any debate around what is Spam other than to say that in the context of google it is generally actions that go contrary to their TOS.
Regardless of that, the majority of affiliate sites doesn't know the first thing about SEO.
The reason why affiliate sites often rank ahead for specific product names etc is that they are focusing on exactly that product, while the mother company often has many other products to sell. Also mother companies sometimes don't want to jeopardize their relations with offline sellers.
Third, if you think a site optimized for getting a high rank in a search engine is a bad thing, you should probably resort to working in an academic area.
Shopping sites, as in your example, naturally are there to sell stuff. You can't realistically expect a shopping site to deliberately stay as in anynomity :)
edited for major grammar errors..tss
[edited by: heini at 5:23 pm (utc) on April 22, 2003]
Definition of Spam?
Stuff you didn't think of when your competitor did.
I like Toolman's the best.
Sites Positioned Above Mine
