Affiliate Tip - Latest Comments in Submitting Affiliate Links to Search Engines

Re: Submitting Affiliate Links to Search Engines

Carsten Cumbrowski — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 14:01:22 -0000

Yeah, Google does that, if it knows about a page, but can't index it. The ugly thing in your case was, that you can't even do anything about it (exclusion request etc.), because the target domain is not under your control.

Funny though that the link showed up in the top results. That says a lot about the merchants knowledge about search. Reminds me of my RN post from last summer.

Anyhow, the Google Coop and Google Base stuff is a whole different beast. Its still a virtually untapped market although some of my predictions from one year ago become already reality and then some. Its a whole topic to blog about by itself hehe.

Re: Submitting Affiliate Links to Search Engines

Shawn Collins — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:53:32 -0000

Hi Carsten -

It was my impression from the question that the person wanted to intentionally get their affiliate links included in the organic results.

I've had some links that go through .htaccess get indexed high myself and change them out when I discover them.

Several months ago, I was contacted by a company where I was an affiliate - my affiliate link (affiliatetip.com/company) that was redirected through .htaccess had become the #3 result in Google.

Completely unintentional, and it looked bad in the SERPs, as there was no meta info - just the link.

Re: Submitting Affiliate Links to Search Engines

Carsten Cumbrowski — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 11:26:56 -0000

I am not sure if the question was describing something like what happened to Andy. There are other ways "to add" links to search engines. Keep in mind that Google results, for example, are today more than just 10 organic results of websites surrounded by 2 PPC ads on top and a bunch of more PPC ads to the right.

Think about Google Coop for example and Google Base where you have things like "Subscribe Links", Custom Refinements, Events and activities, products (Froogle) etc.

Using affiliate links there would add your affiliate links to the search engine and even shows up in the top search results, if you are lucky or if people subscribe to your stuff. I actually do not see anything wrong with that, because you provide a value added service and it is for the most part working on Opt-in basis, meaning users have to get interested in what you are doing and subscribe to it first, before they get exposed to most of your content (with exceptions).

What do you think?

Re: Submitting Affiliate Links to Search Engines

Andy — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 16:22:35 -0000

I accidentally managed it on my main affiliate site - I use htaccess files in a hierarchy of 'outlink' subdirectories for redirects, so my messy affiliate links are shown as mysite.com/outlink/offers/merchantname03, and suchlike. Some of these, bouncing straight to a merchant's site, started showing up on Google when I forgot to block the outlink subdirectory in my robots.txt file. Soon as I saw it, I fixed it (hopefully - certainly haven't seen it happen since). Not the sort of game I want to play.

Re: Submitting Affiliate Links to Search Engines

andrew wee — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 12:54:19 -0000

The workaround for this is to construct a product/service review and contextually embed your aff links.

Build a big enough ball of content this way and you'll build a review site.

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I guess the BH way would be to get a content page indexed, then iframe or swap it for an aff link.

But we're all white hat, aren't we?

And we'd never do something like that...