I have been reading several posts on domain forwarding and it seems that the response is completely mixed. Some people say that its a great way to start yet others say its a waste of time. And then you have the posts saying that Google doesnt like it. daveed7 and NCMedia both recommend it for newbies in their posts: "The best way to make money on click bank." "The Best Advice I Could Ever Give A ClickBank Newbie Affiliate Marketer." In this thread posters state that Google doesnt like it: Is domian forwarding allowed "I don't think Google likes this. You could have some quality score issues if you do it." "Yup, Google doesn't like it." "Yeah google adwords doesn't like it..." So my questions are: Does domain forwarding work with merchants that have good sales pages? Wouldnt it give the same results as direct linking aside from Googles "double serving" rule? Does Google not really like it? Does this mean low quality score...? thanks
AFAIK (from experience in running Google AdWords campaigns), Google does not allow redirects in ads. So the domain name which appears on your ads, needs to be the domain which people end up on. So if your ad is showing ABC.com, the page they have to land on needs to be ABC.com/whatever. It cannot be ABC.com > redirect to MYSHOP.com So for ads I believe redirection is a no-no... For other purposes it's a different matter altogether. It definitely will not help you with you domain ranking high in search results.
I know that if the destination domain is different than the display domain then you are violating their terms. But I have read that with domain forwarding your domain name still appears on the vendors site.. This is from NCMedia posts: "a) Login in to godaddy - click domains - click your domain - click 'forwarding'. Now forward your domain to your hoplink from above. - Masking - YES so now you still see YOUR domain when on the vendors site. Add your meta/keywords and Voila!"
Domain masking actually creates a frame set to hide the vendor's domain and keep your domain on the browser bar. While now clickbank don't allow frame a hoplink in this way. You'd better to create a landing page with your domain and presell the product you pick. Here is the anwser from clickbank's faq. 10. Will I get referral credit if I hide hoplinks by making them open into a frame, iframe, layer, applet, image, or other sub-window object? No. These are illegal hoplinks. For security reasons, and to ensure proper tracking of your referrals, all hoplinks must be targeted to the top level of a new or existing window.
1. You are not using an iframe redirect as this is definitely against Googles tos. 2. Domain forwarding is recommended in many threads as I mentioned above and I know people are doing it. The answer from clickbank faq is not related to domain forwarding. In fact it seems they recommend doing some sort of forwarding see here: https://www.clickbank.com/affiliate_tools.html#Affiliate_Tools_2
ok, where are the people who use domain forwarding or recommend it? Plus the questions I had in my first post. Does domain forwarding work with merchants that have good sales pages? Wouldnt it give the same results as direct linking aside from Googles "double serving" rule? Does Google not really like it? Does this mean low quality score...? thanks
Even if you get away with this right now google will still hit your quality score. So it would be better to build up a landing page for the time being.
Here is what has worked for me, and I do both Article Marketing and PPC. I try to select a Domain Name that will work with more than just a single product. I first set up the domain with a html page that will gather Google Analytics, then meta refresh (one way to redirect a browser) on to the hoplink of the clickbank product. Then you can start writing articles and send them to your top level domain, which redirects to the product, or send your PPC to the domain, but make sure you set the Display URL to the clickbank publishers site, and the Destination URL to your domain. You can also add some PHP scripting in there to do some fancy stuff with tid for tracking. If you decide the niche is awesome, and you develop your own product, landing pages, sales page, etc... then just remove the meta refresh and put your site there, and you will have all those nice article backlinks ready to go. This method allows you to change which product you are promoting, by just changing your redirect, and also lets you gain links, before you start developing the site.
Well if you use them for direct linking through adwords, then yeah that's a bad idea. But if you have an Ezine article, or banner ads on your website, then yes it's great for linking. Come on people, this is common sense mostly.
Is it? daveed7 stated the following in a post "6. Then forward that link to the hoplink of your clickbank product. 7. You can then use google adwords," In another post: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=905417 "Yep, that's what I do for products I don't want to build landing pages for. As long as it is a top level redirect you should be fine." "i do it for products with good sales pages, and it works." I am just trying to understand. The impression I got was that people have success with doing this even with adwords.
the thing is, daveed7's post was written some time ago ... 9 months is a long time in the world of clickbank ... things used to be a lot more relaxed with adwords, that has all changed now days ... google's bots are pretty good at working out if you are direct linking ... and once they bust you once, they'll check you out even harder each and every time from then on ... and of course, if you ever get busted by clickbank, you can say goodbye to any money that they owe you ... absolutely you can do what you choose, but i think the advice given so far stears clearly in one direction