Affiliate site in appearance

does Google not index affiliate sites

[allanp73]

I launched a site several months ago that offers stuff for download. Basically my site reviews the products we have and gives people the ability to download the product if they are interested. Our products are hosted on a separate server so the download links really look like affiliate links. So far Google has only indexed one page and shows only a few backlinks. The site has a pr0 but does show in Google's index. I wonder whether it is penalized for looking like an affiliate. I wonder how I can make Google completely index the site.
This is my first experience with the affiliate situation so any advice would be appreciated.

[Marcia]

Allan, they are indexing affiliate sites, I've had a couple crawled just recently and added to the index. But whether or not or how well they'll rank is a different issue. There's no duplication, it's all original text, graphics and copy and the layouts look no different from regular small ecom sites, which is exactly how they're set up. The difference is that instead of shopping cart or regular links they're affiliate links.

There have been rumblings about sites with affiliate links not getting the best of treatment, but they're not all the same. Some are auto-generated, turning out thousands of pages at a clip and others are hand-rolled with individually hand-crafted pages. I can say that I've seen a couple of sites go down dramatically when affiliate links were added - yet others are still ranking well. It may be a difference in how the links are being done.

No idea at this point Allan, I hope someone can shed some light. I do know that people are being advised to "mask" the fact that there are affiliate links, and in fact I'm looking around for a redirection script myself - for more than one reason, to double check stats and have better info for myself on what's moving well.

That said, I don't think yours would be mistaken since a lot of regular ecom sites use their shopping cart on another server, even with another IP, and there's no ID number in your links.

[allanp73]

All the content is unique. But I can't understand why Google isn't indexing all of the pages. After several months it has only gotten the index page. Where as Yahoo has about 40 pages. I thought it was something to do with the affiliate style links.

[internetheaven]

It could be something completely unrelated to the content of your site. I heard all the scare stories about affiliate links and spent ages trying to work out ways round them when all I had to do was make a robots.txt change as I had accidentally placed the wrong folder in the 'do not visit' section.

A very simple and stupid error but when your creating dozens of web sites a week it takes its toll!

[george123]

Marcia,if you run pages in order to make money dont forget one think ,give content make each page handmade ,unique,informational and add information content,i say so because i'v done it and i can see the harvest everyday.(its a hard work but so is life easymony never comes from nowhere).

[experienced]

Hi,

Affiliate sites are properly indexed by google, even after the major changes in the last Florida update, affiliate sites are doing well :)MY VIEWS

exp...

[chrisnrae]

If you're in a competitive area and don't have a competitive amount of backlinks, this could be your issue. Having a few isn't enough. Also, you said this is a newer domain/site, so that will bring some issues as well.

My best advice to you would be to stop looking at that toolbar. The toolbar is no longer a useful SEO tool in any manner (IMHO). Work on getting some good inbound links - get your appropriate directory listings, work on some one ways, do some reciprocals if needed.

Having affiliate links won't kill your site. Well, not in Google anyway ;). If it's a new domain, you need a strong link development strategy, good internal navigation (dire for a good crawl), good standard promotion outside of the free serps, continual fresh content being added and patience. I hate that last one, but that may just be me ;).

[shri]

As long as you see bizrate, kelkoo etc in the serps you can remain be assured that google is indexing affiliate sites. :)

[isitreal]

After several months it has only gotten the index page

Check the site programming, make sure there isn't a bug that might be triggered when a spider visits that you don't normally see, there are several spider emulators available, or you can just use firefox with the user agent switcher extension with googlebot useragent string set to active to do a rough check of your site programming.

For about a month I had the serps locked in for the error message googlebot received when it hit a site with such programming error : ), the only other time I've seen googlebot stop at the index page was due to reasons outside of what most people will have trouble with, hopefully that's not the case for you.