Hi Guys for a long time now i have been monitoring something very disturbing happening on the google search index to our sites . It seems that google indexes our vendor sites homepage (index page) with the clickbank affiliate id attached to it. for example if i search for "mysite.com" on google it will not show as "mysite.com" but as "mysite.com?hop=someaffilate........" The hop= seems to change with different affiliate id's on the google index every so often, sometimes we get our vendor site back on the index clear of the affiliate tail and some times we do not, in the last few months it had become worst as it always appear with some affiliate tail attached to the domain on the google index. Now here is the kicker. I know many of you will say "so what".... but! for long observation of this phenomenon i have found that every time any of our domains is indexed with an affiliate tail attached to it our website loses all it's major keywords ranking on google for the index page. this is simply devastating to our SEO efforts, it seems that google "punishes" the index page of the domain once it has been indexed with an affiliate tail. sometimes our sites get reindexed again without the affiliate tail in which case we gain back all our SEO keywords for our main domain instantly but this lasts only for a short while until the domain is reindexed with an affiliate tail again and we lose all our SEO keywords again. Lately i have done some more research on this phenomenon and found that we are by far not the only ones effected by this. here is a list of random clickbank vendors i did a google search for and found this indexing problem: do a google search for the following terms and search for the site.com index page: chopper-tattoo.com music-frog.com isatellitelink.com tattoomenow.com you will see that each of these domains is indexed on google with the affiliate tail problem i described above. it seems that google spider indexes the hoplink of affiliates instead of indexing the main site homepage which causes a BIG BIG PROBLEM for all of us in SEO terms. on the other hand i also found that many other clickbank vendors have not been effected by this, here are some random examples of sites indexed properly on google: singorama.com silverlotto.com If you are a clickbank vendor, check your domain to see how it is indexed, if you are indexed with an affiliate tail attached to your domain name i can guarantee you 100% that all your SEO efforts for your main domain have been devastated by this. don't ignore this thread if your site is OK, the situation may change at any given moment indexing your site with an affiliate tail to it. If anyone else has any insights regarding this issue please add this to the post. i am also going to contact clickbank on the issue and need as much insights from other vendors as possible. THX
Yeah some of my sites get THOUSANDS of results with .com/?=id... but to be honest with you, I think G would then have to penalize 60-80% of teh interwebz and anyone else that generates tails of code. G doesn't always know it's an affiliate tail, could just be variables you're adding to a link etc. I have personally never suffered from this (at least not to the point of me noticing or my rev drying up or my clicks stopping). Plus, realistically, you're either in this game to please yourself and do your own money flips without affiliates, thus not needing any aff program/tails - OR - you're in it for the affiliates to make your biz fly, and if that's the case your own.com isn't all that important to rank, your aff's landers are instead (all be it the PPC'ers enjoy a well made SEO'd page for their efforts but that's separate). So - how have you really been affected by this? What do you recommend other than always being on alert? Nothing you can really do about it from a vendor pov.
I'm not concerned about this at all. The true concept of being a clickbank vendor is to have affiliates sell your stuff, so you pretty much make passive income. I do not try to compete with my affiliates, or try to rank the domain. I do not want to compete with my own affiliates.
My vendor site is indexed the same way but it isn't much of a problem because its ranking quite well... I do feel that a problem may arise in future... when some algo techie at google suddenly decides they don't like this... There must be an easy solution to this though. A permanent redirection code in http acesss file may solve the issue. I'm not much of a techie. Lets sort this problem on this thread and bookmark it for future reference.. Anyone?
Yes, it is seen that Google search engine remove those characters which are used in any affiliate id with question mark and it indexed only home page!
This has happened to me also. I see domain.com/hop=affid in google for some of my sites First off its the wrong link format so when I click it and go to the order page it says [affiliate=none] so they don't get the credit anyway. It seems weird but I have just ignored it. Mike
Thx for the responses. first thing, clickbank requested me to compile a list of websites with this problem so they can approach google regarding how to resolve this, if you have been harmed by this please post your vendor site here. i feel i need to make clear my point again. the damage caused by the indexing of the hoplink is not that you lose your commission as it will always show as affiliate=none. the problem is that when a site is indexed on google in such a way it will lose many of it's main domain keyword rankings. NCMEDIA: ------------ I don't think this problem is a sacrifice we need to make as vendors, there should not be a choice between either having affiliates and having search engine rankings. these can and need to co-exist. if your have had a site such as widgets.com and you used to rank well on google for "buy widgets" and used to get lots of sales per day from this keyword, and now your site does not appear under "buy widgets" because of this bad indexing then you would probably understand my problem. the fact that affiliates are promoting does not have to be instead of a vendor's SEO efforts they can live together peacefully. "Yeah some of my sites get THOUSANDS of results with .com/?=id lets think this through, your main domain index page is only one page. how come it is being indexed thousands of times over and over again? in theory this means that google considers each affiliate id tail as a different version or a copy of the same webpage?? maybe this causes a "double content" punishment? or in your case "thousands of duplicate content cases" punishment... Ripped --------------- the fact that your websites ranks well on SEO does not mean you "compete" with your affiliates. i do not agree with this logic. Jackie8 ---------------- How do you know that your keyword rankings have not been damaged due to this indexing? do you know how you were ranking before your site was indexed like this? i have been checking this issue for ages, and i promise you that each time google indexes a website in such a way it loses most of it's keyword rankings for the main domain name/index page. i have also seen this reverse (when the site suddenly gets indexed properly all keyword rankings return instantly until the next time it will get indexed with the affiliate id on the tail). webtester01 ------------------------ Thx for sharing the information. will adding the main domain in the META header tag stop google from indexing the homepage with an affiliate tail? mikeyman120 ---------------- Sorry buddy, you did not get the point. please read this post and my first post. your site is damaged from a completely different angle. Thx
Yep I totally hear you Dark. If I was building sites that relied heavily on SEO as a vendor and was trying to rank, and my affiliate efforts backfired which affected my internal direct hits/earnings perhaps I'd be pissed. The fact that your logic = "I can/need to co-exist with aff's" is not everyone elses, most vendors are two fold 1. They aim for direct sales 2. They aim for affiliate sales. Sure they co-exist by default, and you're absolutely right one should never affect the other however google is a third party (be it a big one/the main one), and if you aim your profit paths through them, you know shit can change on the fly, slaps happen when they shouldn't, random backfires happen, they hate affiliate sites and draw a fine line between acceptable and ad driven... Anyway, just saying most vendors don't compete with nor care to rank the main site because their 'step 1' thinking was to aim the business at affiliate income and passive at that - instead of both. I think those that aim at both get limited results, affiliates notice you competing, ranking, ppc'ing, going direct over their ads/bum marketing efforts, etc. In some cases vendors do things on purpose not to rank. I dunno, guess I would never rely on too many internal seo campaigns for that very reason but that doesn't mean everyone else will, getting affiliates is hard as it is, openly telling them you're ok with competing/co-existing to the point of where if you get hit with a slap you suffer a lot isn't something I think they will respond well to. "I have a site, and as a perk I'm letting you promote and compete with me because the market is large enough" < I get it, still in this CB world, it's almost a given that it's more like "I have a site and hope to god you promote me so I don't have to, and so tons of you guys can take the pie without my interruption or being the main competitor"... .02. Still would be nice if G fixed this shit, and yes, I've had phases of thousands of these as stated - 30 products, each one does this. Alexa does it too (or used to anyway - and it was worse)... Still, can't say any site has been slapped around because of it to my knowledge.