Can Affiliates Get a Site Banned?

Will this get us into trouble?

[naturalinstinct]

I've read many times that creating doorway pages and using server redirects from other domains can get you penalties with google and it's not something I would ever consider doing.

However, one of our affiliates seems to have set up a site that just redirects every page to us and when a do an "allinurl" search on google for our site, google lists pages from that site as if it is part of ours.

I've been advised to investigate this and ask the affiliate to stop as it could get us penalised or banned. If this is true it brings into question the assumption that "nothing any external webmaster does can penalise your site".

I don't want to have to start banning affiliates but I don't want my site dropping out of google wither so who is right?

[coolasafanman]

i dont think u need to worry. allinurl just says, 'show me pages where this text is part of the url' so they probably have something like [blah.com?url=www.yoursite.com...]

you're fine.

[mayday9]

The way I see it there are two types of sites, non commercial (informational) and commercial (information is just used to attract ppl for the purpose of cashing them). In my experience google prefers informational sites. Affiliate links are a big give away, specially the ones which link using text "ENTER HERE" or something similar. That's a giveaway the site is a doorway to affiliate program.

does anyone have any experience where affiliate links held a site's potential down?

Darko

[getvisibleuk]

I think the important point to note is that there is NO content on this site.

Every page just redirects to the product in the merchant's site.

The only things that are there are keyword stuffed pages that describe that product. The User never actually see's anything on that site.

The guy has been clever in that it redirects from that site to another of his sites which automatically redirects to NaturalInstinct's site.

Would any (sorry this) malpractice affect the site that the gain is made on? To me it's dispicable that people can not be bothered to create content and just rely on meta redirects with affiliate code in them.

[olderscot]

If that's all they're doing then unless they have some way of directing traffic to their url they're wasting your time and I'd have no concerns about closing their affiliate status.

In fact I'm surprised it's not part of your affilliate terms that this isn't allowed.

If you're just concerned about your status on google ask them to disallow google in their robots.txt file. This way google will ignore their pages.

Mike

[FillDeCube]

travelnow is one of the example where google bann it.
It was banned because it distribute hotels data to its' affiliate.

[percentages]

naturalinstinct, I don't see how your site will suffer from a Google persepective.

Whether you want to allow affiliates to operate in this way is another question, which only you can answer.

I've seen a number of affiliate sites try these tactics before.....they never seem to survive for very long. I have never figured out whether this is because the supplier cuts them off or because Google does......tricky to tell as Inktomi seems to be able to combat this type of activity before it starts and therefore no real comparison is available.