Penalized for outbound affiliate links?

Is it possible to get penalized for outbound affiliate links? It may be coincidence, but about 5 days after I added CJ affiliate ads to my site I dropped from around 5 to 131 for one of my keyword phrases. Any thoughts?

 

I love the "almost" real time responses I get on this forum. Thank you Shawn, I will give that a try. I don't like giving away the PR to affiliates anyway.

 

My main sites, especially my main one Webdango, has really taken a pounding over the last few months. I've lost about 70% of my SE traffic - Google referrals down from around 400 a day to about 50. I've avoided tinkering to see if it would all settle, but all I've seen is me drop off the face of Google for one key phrase after another. My income has dropped to about 30% of my average 2003 levels.

So now I've started tinkering. I never did any tricky stuff - no cloaking, no redirects, etc. All straight up content/meta-tags.

Yahoo has made public it's planned bias against affiliate sites. Is Google doing the same behind the scenes?

I've got a lot of affiliate links, since part of my "service" is a shopping directory. The majory of my click throughs and sales come from products links; I use datafeed from several vendors to offer a sort of mini shopping comparison site.

I tried doing redirects on affiliate links and found that some affiliates don't accept them (Linkshare comes to mind). I tried a response.redirect and a javascript one as well. No go.

What about meta tag refresh? I could pass the url in a querystring variable, or even a form variable, and then do a metag to the url.

Or I could do a 302 redirect with a response.header.

Are the outbound affiliate links hurting my SE positioning?

Any suggestions?

Thanks

TampaDave

 

Most of my sites are heavily endowed with affiliate links. I've hidden the links on some sites and not hidden them on others. The sites with straight html links (non-hidden) rank #1. Those with hidden links are much farther down. I actually don't think they are further down BECAUSE they are hidden; more likely because I haven't spent enough time on those sites. Nevertheless, having affiliate links on my sites (even on pages where I have at least 40 links) are doing great. So I wouldn't focus my attention there if I were you. Look elsewhere for a cause.

 

Thanks for the feedback. I have since bounced back and all is well again.

 

Simple question, do they work?

Do people earn a good amount of revenue from affiliate websites, and which tends to be the best (I'm UK based)

This is probably a stupid question - but do you optimise the page your affiliate links are placed on, i.e. if I had a page of car rental affiliates, do you optimise this page, include content, etc.

Darren

 

rwhetsto,

I agree with Donna and have lots of affilaites doing well in the search engines. May have just been a Google oops.

wwhhomes,

Yes they work. I have affiliates mkaing over 10K a month in some of my programs. But it takes a lot of work, knowledge and great SEO skills to make any money and also takes picking the right programs.

How do you find the good programs? Focus on programs that fit the niche of your existing sites that your currant visitors will be interested in. Or build a new site based on your interests or hobbies. If you can focus on something you know about and are passionate about it will help you stay committed until the money starts and will also make it easier to write good content.

Best of luck!

 

wmhhomes, affiliate programs can definitely be very profitable. i pay my bills through them, but i don't get rich. nevertheless, a client of mine makes over 10k per month through one affiliate program. luckily, because almost all of the money is made through my efforts, i get a piece of it. unfortunately, the non-compete clause means i can't make it myself from the same type of industry. ah well...c'est la vie. but several things are important - yes, you need to have a well-ranking website in your niche (and that means a well-optimized one), and yes, as 5star pointed out, the affiliate program needs to be of interest to the people coming to your site. after that, everything is just using good business sense to keep the dollars rolling in.

 

I'm pretty sure google does penalise sites with large affiliates.

I started a site 7 months ago.
one one of the keyphrases I use.
Month 1. No rank
Month 2. 783
Month 3 563
Month 4 423
Month 5 358
Month 6 No Rank
Month 7 No Rank (Current Month).

Traffic was growing by around 200% per month, but is now at about
where I was 5 months ago.

I setup a Shopping Mall with 30 affiliate outbound links. 3 weeks after
doing this I lost my rank from 358 to no-mans land.

So I removed all affiliate outbounds about 2 months ago and I still
have no rank even though my links have gone from 0 at the start to
400 odd now.

So from my experiance doing what I did you get penalised for.

Rgds,mode