Yahoo and affiliate links

[djtaverner]

I read a while back somewhere in WW that yahoo was penalizing / banning websites with to many affiliate links.

What about sites like [shopping.net?...] Which is all affiliate links, I cant see them banning them.

Can anyone confirm this?

Cheers
Dave

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 12:47 pm (utc) on Mar. 31, 2004]
[edit reason] all urls must be linked. thanks. [/edit]

[walkman]

because they provide a service to visitors is my guess. Shopping directory, and they list a few things about each store. I don't think Y! cares if you make money or not as long as they think users will benefit. Not carved in stone and depends who reviews the site but I don't think you making money is the problem...

If the pulled that content from another site and another 50 webmasters did the same but with different templates, then it would be different. I think this si what they mean. Or a site with barely any useful info, just affiliate links. If it takes you hours a day to maintain and update I think it's useful.

[2_much]

My understanding is that the problem isn't affiliate links per se, just the duplicate content that affiliate sites produce. So I wouldn't worry so much about affiliate links if your site has unique content.

[DaveN]

I agree with 2_much on this, datafeeds are one area where you get the same content over and over again....

DaveN

[Labyrinth]

If it takes you hours a day to maintain and update I think it's useful.

Which is not the same as Yahoo! thinking it's useful. I work very hard to make a site useful to my VISITORS, I work to get repeat traffic, I work to make the site sticky.

And I've been successful -- about 20-25% of my traffic is return traffic.

But it's not good enough for Yahoo! Search on my site name (not a generic name) and of the several hundred results, my actual site is next to last -- all the other listings are sites that link to mine.

And I don't use datafeeds -- though I see tons of datafeed sites happily enjoying their Yahoo! listings.