Google and Clickbank .... A Problem?

Hoplinks and Redirects ... reason for penalty?

[scania3]

Is anybody familiar with Clickbank as a payment processor for downloadable products? They allow affiliates to set up hoplinks to sell your products for a commission, i.e.:

www.yoursite.com/xxxx.xxxx
or
www.yoursite.com/?source=affiliatesite.com

Does anyone have an opinion on whether these could cause a penalty for www.yoursite.com as they could be duplicate content. Affiliates can also redirect to a site.

Or would the dominant domain be determined and survive if for instance it had a DMOZ listing.

I know of a site that went from PR 4 to 0 to gray in this situation.

[Traveler]

Don't do that!
Google will pick up the /? and view it as a different page
Then chances are good that you WILL be penalized for duplication.
Trust me on this one....I am just now recovering from a fiasco almost exactly like what you are describing.
ALL of your pages should simple point to your main page. Allow your affilliate to grab your source code another way.

Really....don't do it!

[Ceverett]

OK,

Given a number of inbound link URLs like this:

[widgetworld.com...]
[widgetworld.com...]
[widgetworld.com...]

which each redirect to the same URL, such as

[widgetworld.com...]

after dropping a cookie:

Set-Cookie: name=affiliate; value=foo; domain=.widgetworld.com; path=/catalog;

What I get you're saying is that I wont be penalized for duplicate content, right?

but if I have multiple URLs such as

[widgetworld.com...]
[widgetworld.com...]
[widgetworld.com...]

The spiders will think we have duplicate content?

[scania3]

Thanks Traveler and Ceverett for the info:

I know that the commission option has been diabled for this product. But the affiliate links remain and will linger for awhile.

Ceverett, you are correct with your description of the one type of "subdomain" (I guess one could call it).

Would this be problematic with G in your view. It seems that the G algo should be sophisticated enough to not discriminate against legit affiliate programs (for unproblematic domain names), and should be able to index the main domain name through DMOZ and Yahoo listings and avoid the others hoplink urls that you described.

I am also wondering about affiliate redirects as opposed to hoplinks off the main url in this regard. How would these be viewed by G?

Thanks for you thoughts!

[eyeinthesky]

scania 3, I've been with clickbank for more than a year and have a PR 5 on my main site. So far no problems although backlinks seem to "suffer" a bit.

Been getting regular traffic from referral affiliate sites, obviously pointing to their own version of my website.

[mymommybiz]

I have been with Clickbank well over a year, and have had no problem with PR on any of those pages.

Clickbank's autogenerated clicks are actually formatted as hop.clickbank.net/?company.affiliate

For the links to be generated as www.yoursite.com/xxxx.xxxx you would have to buy one of the third-party programs you see advertised that would allow you to offer your affiliates these kind of links. They boast that it will increase your link popularity to do so, but there is no stopping where your affiliates would post that link, be it message boards, spam boards or link farms.

There are many, many "Clickbank Marketplaces" on the internet, and the majority seem to have a very low PR, but this doesn't seem to affect anything PR or link related.

[Dugger]

After being an occaisional lurker - this thread finally brought me out of the shadows. I have a site that went PR0 back in November 2001 and I searched high and low for the problem.

A few weeks ago I made a discovery that leads me to believe that I found the problem - and it is related to ClickBank.

The hoplinks themselves are probably not the problem but there are some enterprising folks out here that are framing sites from ClickBank's list and using the sites' title and tags in an effort earn some affiliate money. When I stumbled upon this I found that the directory that included the frame controller page for my site was unsecured - so I was able to see that the file date for the frame controller page used to frame my site was November 2001 - the same month my site went PR0. I suspect that I have found my problem!

These same guys run a couple of sites doing the same framing thing - so from Google's perspective I am sure it looks like a couple of duplicate sites. By the way - their frame controller pages are also PRO.

I checked a number of sites of their other "victims" and they were PR0 as well.

These guys took down the pages upon my request and I hope once it works its way thru the system I will get my PR back.

I would caution anyone from offering anything to any affiliates - not just those using ClickBank. It probably is not worth the risk .

[edited by: Dugger at 3:20 am (utc) on April 16, 2003]

[rfgdxm1]

1991? Since you use that twice in the above post, what do you really mean?

[Dugger]

oops sorry, I meant 2001 :)

[mymommybiz]

Hmmm... that is interesting. I have seen a few sites do that with my site (top frame and same title text with the bottom frame actually called through the Clickbank hoplink. I asked someone about it, and we decided that because the bottom frame was actually my page framed that it would know it was the same page and not duplicate content.

But I also thought that there would have been a lag factor at work, and you wouldn't suddenly get a PR0 the same month they created that page - wouldn't it take a month or two to catch up with the update before you would be hit with a PR0? So there could be another issue at work behind the PR0.

[Dugger]

Their file dates were for the beginning of November and the update was at the end of November which is lots of time for Googlebot to spider and include the results (and the PR0 ) in the end of month update.

Since my site was already a framed site these guys had copied the frame controller page word for word - title, tags, and optimized <no frames> - their pages were exact duplicates to any spider.

If you have a site with PR0 and also use ClickBank I would definately check this out as all of the sites that these guys framed that I checked use ClickBank and are PR0 for no other obvious reason.

It is not just sites from 2001 that are affected - they continue this practice today. 2001 is when ClickBank began their affiliate initiative and when these guys began their activities.

[scania3]

Dugger,

Could you send me a sticky on how to check for this framing issue. I have alot of affiliate sites with more appearing every week. I am not too web savvy. Thanks