Switched to different affiliate - Site is going nowhere

[cmendla]

I was using one affiliate for my sites. not a lot of sales but the sites were getting OK traffic.

I tried a different affiliate. This one has a tool that generates pages for your site (you host the pages).

What happened was that this site has gone nowhere for the last 6 months. PR is 0., A pitiful 5 visitors in the last two months according to google analytics.

I'm assuming that I really need to either go back and

1. Use nofollow links the the affiliate generated pages
2. Drop the affiliate althogether and switch to my old one.
3. There is supposed to be a way to mess more with the css in the generator tool but I'm not sure that would produce any positive results. I'm not sure if that is worth the effort.

Anyway, I'd appreciate any insights and if someone could let me know if I can name the affiliate program.

thanks

chris

It would be helpful if I could name the affiliate but I'm not sure if that is OK with WW's TOS.

[edited by: tedster at 12:43 am (utc) on Feb. 16, 2009]

[tedster]

Sorry, but no, we will not discuss specific affiliate programs by name.

You're correct that changing the css will not have much affect. But from your description, it sounds like the program itself creates the actual content for your pages. You're not going to get very far in Google with that kind of thing.

Google wants all sites that they rank well to offer users unique and useful content. If your content is essentially the same as any other site in the same affiliate program, Google does not want to rank you highly and send traffic. At the very least, you've got to be adding significant value to content that other sites use - and ideally, you would not be duplicating content at all.

To rank well, you've got to give Google the kind of site they want to send their users to. If the site was built essentially to hold affiliate links, then it's going to have trouble. But if it was built to offer something to the visitor that is both unique and adds value, and then also has some affiliate links added, that's the kind of affiliate site Google feels is of value to their users.

Otherwise, you'll need to find another traffic source, because Google won't be offering much.

[cmendla]

Tedster - Thanks for the quick reply. It is not just affiliate contentbut pics and reviews

What I think I'm going to try is to make sure all of the affiliate generated pages are in one folder, then exclude that folder via robots.txt. Finally any links to that folder will be a nofollow. Unless someone sees somthing obviously bad with that I'll give it a try (nothing to lose really at this point). I figure it will probably take a couple of weeks or even 2-3 months to generate traffic.

If that doesn't work, then I'll drop that affiliate completely.

Chris