Affiliate URL in SERPS

Affiliates querystring listed for my website

[glitterball]

Hi,

I am not sure why this is happening as there is a redirect as soon as a visitor enters my site, but for some reason the URL in yahoo for my home page includes one of our affiliates querystrings.

Anyone else come across this, possible solutions?

[ogletree]

Maybe somebody is doing a PFI on that. Other people can sign up at sitematch with your URL + their AFF ID.

[glitterball]

Is there any way for me to check if this is the case?

[raptorix]

lol, very smart of that person ;)

[glitterball]

Anyone else come across the same problem or can suggest a solution?

I don't want to accuse the affiliate of anything, if I'm not 100% sure.

[Spannerworks]

glitterball not sure if this is your problem, but depending on the redirect used by the affiliate and the link populairty of their URL, it's possible for your page to rank under their URL.

A 302 redirect for eaxmple will index your page under their URL, if they have more link popularity.

[glitterball]

I have just done a search 'link: the_offending_url' in Google (I'm not sure how to do a search for pages that link to in Yahoo) and it comes back with nothing.

Is there any way I can find out if someone has paid to include this URL in inktomi?

My site has been in around this position for this particular keyword for several years, does this mean that if someone decides to stop paying for inclusion (if this is the case) that my pages would be dropped?

If so this is a serious flaw and a potential means of attacking a competitor - pay for inclusion of the competitors home page and then stop, the competitor will then be forced to pay for inclusion.

[ogletree]

From reading what Yahoo has been saying here is my take on what they do. It is probably not technically right but is a correct way of looking at it.

Yahoo has 2 databases. Free database and PFI database. They also have the final product which I will call SERPS. The free database does it's own thing getting URL's by spidering and basically updates itself. The PFI database has a finite list of URL's that it gets from people that are currently paying and some URL's that Yahoo decides to throw in for free out of the kindness of their own heart.

The free database does not care what is in the PFI database. It does it's own thing no matter if you are paying or not.

When Yahoo decides to update the SERPS with the free database it puts it into the SERPS database which already has the PFI database in it because that is updated quite regularly. When the free database gets dumped in it will skip over results that have a PFI flag on them because they are more up to date.

As soon as PFI is turned off Yahoo takes out the PFI results and gets the most recent result from the free database and puts that into the results. Yahoo_Mike said that when it is turned back on it takes several hours for the PFI database to replace the free database result with the updated one.

The free database and PFI database each has their own timeing and relationship to the SERPS. The raw SERPS are just that raw. Yahoo then runs an algo on this merged database and the algo has no idea if the results it sees are PFI or Free.

I could be completely off but this is how I understand if from reading all the Yahoo employee posts.

[soapystar]

If so this is a serious flaw and a potential means of attacking a competitor - pay for inclusion of the competitors home page and then stop, the competitor will then be forced to pay for inclusion.

which is why people objected to the INk penalties being imported into Yahoo as lifetime bans. Many felt competitors were doing exactly that. Paying to tget them included them dropping them. They then were penalised from free listings and it carrried into Yahoo. Anecdotal of course.

[ogletree]

I forgot to include penaltys. It does not matter I don't think even Yahoo knows what is going on there. I think they have a huge juggernaught that some extinct race built and they don't know what it does.

[skibum]

There are a fair number of sites with afilaite programs like that that have tons of affiliate links in both Yahoo! and Google. Most never rank but every now and then one of em gets enoug link pop to hop right up there.

[Robert Charlton]

Sounds like it's a problem with the way the engines handle redirects on redirected counting pages many affiliates, directories, and banner ads use to count clicks. It's been an ongoing problem that the engines haven't addressed. Here's the latest thread on it:

Meta Refresh leads to ...
... Replacement of the target URL!
[webmasterworld.com...]

I wish Tim and Yahoo_Mike would take a look at the thread and comment. It's not just a Google problem. I'd also seen it on Inktomi, and it sounds like you're seeing it now on Yahoo.

[Yidaki]

Oh well, i just found some weird 302 results at google:

21,600,000 results
# 19 is a sitestat link (302) url-only, click tracking link
# 20 is a web.de link (302) url-only, with a 75 char session id

I'm not sure whose fault these listings are. Sure google shouldn't list them. But if they are not disallowed by robots.txt, it's w3c standard to list them with their origin url ...

I have many 302 url-only listings at google too. But they are all disallowed through robots.txt so they usually don't show in the results.

It's wise to block all tracking / affiliate urls through robots.txt as long as robots are too dumb to understand their purpose.

But since webmasters don't have controll about their incoming links, the 302 / meta refresh errors are a perfect way to wipe out competitors. Thanks, you robots you.