On many occassions, after having searched on Google for a particular CJ advertiser, I have found what looks like CJ publisher links which have been indexed by Google. For example, if you conduct a search for bargain network homes, you will see the following listing presented towards the bottom of page one (please excuse the low quality of this image): As you can see, it looks like someone has managed to get his/her Bargain Network Homes affiliate link to be indexed by Google, which is impossible. If you click on the link, it goes directly to the Bargain Network Homes landing page. How did this person do this? Is this some kind of new trick or something? Did s/he register his/her affiliate link as a domain, create a redirect landing page, and somehow optimise it to display for bargain network homes queries? If anyone can put forward an explanation for this, I'd appreciate it.
I think that before learning how to do this trick, the best thing to know is to check if it is allowed or not to place your affiliate links directly on organic results. Yesterday I noticed that someone is doing the same with an advertiser that I promote. If it is not allowed I'll contact not my advertiser, but CJ and demand that they warn/disable this publisher account if he really is doing something that is not allowed.
Only Google controls their natural search results, not publishers (it's not like a specific publisher can add their link to the first page, or any page, of Google). It's a Google issue, not a publisher issue.
Maybe you are rigth, maybe not - but there is the possibility that the publisher is adding the affiliate link directly in Google's add url.
OK. We have one theory so far, presented by Micromag: The publisher might have submitted his affiliate link to the Google Add URL service and subsequently had it indexed. Quite possibly the answer, I think. Any other theories?
This has been happening for a long time. As far as I know it's a Google anomaly and only happens sporadically. I don't know of anyone that's found a way to do it on purpose. 3 years ago one of my clients was LIVID because an affiliate link actually replaced in at the top of the SERPS for his primary KW. The client had always been on top and now his listing was gone, an affiliate replaced him and now he had to pay an affiliate for traffic that should have been his to begin with. This wasnt even a CJ program so it's not specific to CJ. The affiliate is one of the most well known names in the entire industry! The merchant threatened to can the affiliate and not pay him. Merchants typically don't believe affiliates that end up being lucky enough to have their links in the serps. But as far as I know it's just a random fluke.
Just because you add a link for Google to index doesn't mean it will show up. In fact, since it is just a 301 Redirect HTTP code that CJ sends, the page shouldn't show up at all (whether it was spidered or added). Google primarily uses spidering to add links (for relevancy), not from submitting a link.