What counts as affiliate links?

[logixlord]

Dear All,

My website is supposed to have ads in certain places on the pages. Currently, since we are not expecting any ads till the end of the year, we have placed affiliate banners in there as placeholders. The banners are currently not even activated, meaning that they are just images, and do not link to any other sites at the momment.

All the pages on the site have original content, only the sides have these banners placed on them.

My question is, does such a setup also count as a violation of yahoo! policy? I can understand if you have affiliate content etc. but this is not content, only affiliate ads, and the content is original.

Asking becuase my homepage only shows up twice in the search, and it appears that the rest of the pages are net even getting crawled right now.

Regards

[gamb]

nobody exactly knows.

i have the most comprehensive site for product x on the internet. All original content and very helpful. Instead of banner ads I sell links to places where you can buy product x on each page. I think they see those as affiliate links.

I haven't been ranked in 1.5 years, and despite review requests they won't do a thing about it.

short answer: you never know.

[Jakpot]

logixlord,
I'm sorry but what specific yahoo policy are you referring to?
Pls provide a url directing me to it.
Thanks

[hmatisse]

Jakpot,

I think it is [help.yahoo.com...]

Also Yahoo_Mike talks about it here:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[martinibuster]

Images that aren't linked are not affiliate links (they're not even links). Since Yahoo can't understand what your images are, your fears are unfounded.

Look to more reasonable reasons why a site may not be crawled too often, like the quality of the inbound links. Often it's not enough to have directory links as IBLs. Try picking up more links.

On a side note, some people say that having a site hosted on a shared server will slow down your spidering. The thinking goes that placing a site on a dedicated server will open up more bandwidth for spidering, bandwidth that is choked on a server hosting 14,000 other websites in a shared hosting environment.

In any case, the Yahoo content guidelines have to do with ratio of original content to non-original content. As long as you don't have a page of outgoing affiliate links with a short blurb you'll be ok.

This thing about Y punishing Affiliate sites is a tin hat myth that is easily disproved and dismissed by searching for common items you have around your home. It's a bull#*$! theory.

Consider established and well founded reasons why your site may not be spidered.