Forum Moderators: mack
I am finding sites ranking in the top 5, the sites at question are affiliate links i.e. www.domain.com/a=123. They usually only have about 3-4 back links, yet they are ranking at the top for very competitive terms. How this is possible when sites below them have 1000’s of quality links? The root domain has even more links, yet it also ranks nowhere.
This is good news for affiliates. I noticed a domain that has the top 3 positions, held by three affiliates a= 123/124/125/
Sometimes happens in Google as well with certain affiliate link formats.
This would be good news for affiliates if not for the fact that the listings are usually too short-lived to be worth chasing after.
I may be wrong but it seems reasonable to think that perhaps this happens when the spider crawls and indexes the affiliate-encoded URL before the proper URL, indexes that, and corrects the listing when the proper URL gets indexed.
this is because MSN hasn't tuned the algorithm to properly see redirect and they weight links so heavily that several affiliates (us included) are taking advantage of this. We are getting affiliate links to the top of results within days of the link being created. We can;t see this lasting as more and more people catch onto this MSN will become crowded with affiliate links, we all hated see the eBay AdWords everywhere but with the MSN algorithm you might be seeing eBay ads within the results.
