Combo Affiliate & Adsense site lost traffic and revenue?

[Marcia]

Sorry to cross post, but when search engines index the tracking URLs instead of your pages, it can profoundly affect publishers using Adsense and completely kill income for sites.

If this is happening, visitors will never see your pages:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[jomaxx]

With respect to AdSense in particular, Google will never see any such links because Googlebot does not execute Javascript.

Plus the redirect URL goes through domain "pageads2.googlesyndication.com", which is blocked from being spidered by the robots.txt file. So even if the code is delivered server-side, which is the case with some premium publishers, Googlebot should never spider those links or know where they actually go.

[Marcia]

It is not a matter of any search engine seeing those Adsense adverts, it's a matter of visitors never getting to the pages to see the Adsense. So if publishers' pages are being dumped from the SERPs, then Adsense income is 100% out of the window for those pages as far as traffic from the SERPs with the error is concerned.

And incidentally, many of those Adsense tracking URLs can be found in the MSN SERPs rather than the pages the ads are on. Some even have www.google.com as the page title.

Added:
It doesn't matter if the tracking URLs are being blocked by robots.txt at Google, they're being crawled and retrieved from right on the publishers' pages.

[edited by: Marcia at 11:13 pm (utc) on Dec. 11, 2007]

[jomaxx]

But how can publisher pages be dumped from Google if Google doesn't see the contents of the AdSense blocks in the first place?

Anyway I'm still waiting for even one example, so that we'll have something specific to discuss.

[Marcia]

I can't and won't give any specifics [webmasterworld.com], most especially search keywords, but it isn't Google as far as those URLs coming up for searches, because they don't at Google. However, there is a *lot* of it happening at MSN Live Search and the pages are GONE, being replaced by the tracking URLs which naturally, won't retain rankings because they aren't pages.

Anyone who does affiliate marketing of products, in addition to also running Adsense, should know which the affiliate networks are and what their tracking URLs look like. For those who don't do affiliate marketing, it doesn't affect them except for the few Adwords URLs, which are far, far less prevalent.

Note: The reason I've posted to share the information with others is so that if others have lost traffic (esp. MSN) and income and also have aff links on their pages, they'll know what to look for to see if it's affecting them. They'll know how to search for the tracking URLs and can search on their own search terms (which they know) to see if it's happening to them and their pages have disappeared.

Added:

But how can publisher pages be dumped from Google if Google doesn't see the contents of the AdSense blocks in the first place?

To clarify again (in addition to that Google Search isn't the big problem), it's primarily the affiliate tracking URLS that are causing the problem.

Therefore if the publisher's page has affiliate links on it, the page can disappear from the Live index. Those tracking URLs will redirect over to the merchant's site (with 302 redirects inbetween) and may or may not convert (1 in 100 clicks is average), but the searcher (the human) never gets to see the publisher's page because the publisher's page is gone, having been replaced in the index for the search, so therefore they never see the Adsense. Impressions will drop, so will income drop (for the publisher and Adsense for their share).

Also, it's irrelevant to this issue, but Google can "see" Javascript, they just don't expend the resources to bother with it.

No visitors to page = no Adsense seen = no Adsense clicks = no $ possible from Adsense from that page.

[edited by: Marcia at 1:12 am (utc) on Dec. 12, 2007]