Panda and affiliate networks
-
Last year we were hit with a Panda penalty and have been unable to recover from this. We removed all duplicate content from our site and SEOMoz confirms this.
I have spoken to a new SEO company and they have identified that the cause maybe our content being duplicated off site by affiliates who are using our product feed such as Shopwiki and Thefind.
Is this a possibibilty and if so I presume the easiest thing to do is stop these affiliates using our descriptions.
Neil
-
Hi,
I ended the affiliate programmes with Shopwiki, Digidrop and one or two other similar affiliates. We saw a quick and small bounce back of some product related terms but it has take a while for the affiliates to remove our data so their listings are still dropping our of google. It seems that for some reason the affiliates are being credited with being the owners of the content and therefore listing higher than us.
Do you think this is because the feeds are uploading every night and Shopwiki etc are being spidered quicker than our site. One solution may be a weeks delay in new products being put onto our affiliate feeds.
Here is an example of where the affiliates are all listing above the link for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk
Please let me know what you think and how you are getting on with the issues you are experiencing.
-
Hello
Did you get any further with this? We are in a similar position with shop wiki and would love to know how you got on with this issue.
Thanks
-
All the content is written by us. The reason I chose that item is that it is basically an own brand item. Heres another example
"Two-layer Gore-Tex uppers and Ballistics cloth bottoms make these Black Diamond Front Point Gaiters ideal for glacial travel and ice climbing.
The Front Point Gaiters provide warmth and waterproofing, and are tough as nails in repelling crampon spikes. Secured underfoot with a burly strap, these gaiters are easy to put on or remove using a velcro closure system and shock cord."
As you can see all the sites listed are affiliate shopping sites.
-
As the affiliates are through networks they have affiliate tracking code so there is no link building benefit to us.
Our URL is www.gear-zone.co.uk and you can see if you google this text we do not appear first
"Get a grip when the weather does its worst with these excellent snow and ice grips.
Each sole is equipped with 13 self-tapping, replaceable carbon steel screw spikes, providing superb traction in the ice and snow."
It relates to this page so as you can see there is definatly a problem
-
Do you have canonical tags? Is it possible to add a cross-site canonical to any of the affiliate pages? At the very least they should link directly back to the relevant product page on your own site.
-
Thats an awful lot of work as our catalogue is over 4000 items and to be honest they are not contributing as much as they have in the past.
Is there some clever code to force Google to show we are the primary source?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Panda Penalty Recovery?
My site: www.stephita.com, is based in Toronto, Canada. It used to rank top 3 in local and national searches for "wedding invitations" and "wedding invitations toronto". I've now been placed on the dreaded page 2 ;| I didn't keep up with the times and news, and wasn't aware of Google Panda Penalty until earlier this year 😞 So, I've cleaned up most of my site with what I suspect what caused me to drop: a) Cloaking pages - I had PHP script generate about 1000 pages of "cloaked" pages. This has been removed, and I've used Google webmaster tools to "remove" the directory as well. b) Duplicate Content pages - (not cloaked, but I've done content writing on the majority of my product pages) The 2 items above is what I "assume" caused a Google Penalty... I started this cleanup endeavour late January, and with the content writing to remove what MOZ tools notices as duplicate pages. I've read online that Panda is now part of the search algorithm. So does that mean, ideally, I should start seeing "better" ranking results now? Or is there a process I should be following and submitting my site for "reconsideration"? Thanks all!
Technical SEO | | TysonWong0 -
Affiliate Url & duplicate content
Hi i have checked passed Q&As and couldn't find anything on this so thought I would ask.
Technical SEO | | Direct_Ram
I have recently noticed my URLS adding the following to the end: mydomain.com/?fullweb=1 I cant seem to locate where these URLS are coming from and how this is being created? This is causing duplicate content on google. I wanted to know ig anyone has had any previous experience with something like this? If anyone has any information on this it would be a great help. thanks E0 -
Is Panda as aggressive as Penguin in terms of being able to escape its clutches ?
Hi, Is being hit by Panda as hard to get out of as being hit by Penguin ? Or if you clean up all your content should you get out of it relatively quickly ? I have a very old (11 years) and established site (but also very neglected site that i'm looking to relaunch) but its on an ancient shopping cart platform which never allowed for Google analytics & GWT integration etc so i cant see any messages in GWT or look at traffic figures to correlate a drop with any Panda updates. The reason i ask is i want to relaunch the site after bringing up to date with a modern e-commerce platform. I originally launched the site in early 2002 and was perceived well by Google achieving first field of view SERPS for all targeted keywords however competitive, including 'ipod accessories', 'data storage' etc etc. These top positions (& resulting sales) lasted until about 2007 when it was overtaken by bigger brand competitors with more advanced & Google friendlier ecommerce platforms (& big SEO budgets) I originally used the manufacturers descriptions editing slightly but probably not enough to avoid being considered duplicate content although still managed to obtain good rankings for these pages for a very long time even ranking ahead of Amazon in most cases. The site is still ranking well for some of the keywords relating to products for which there is still manufacturer copied descriptions so i actually don't think i have been hit by Panda. So my questions Is, is there any way of finding out for sure if the site has indeed even been hit by Panda at all without looking at analytics & gwt ? And once i find out if it has or not: Is it best if i relaunch on same domain to take advantage of the 11 year old domain history/authority etc ? So long as i make sure all product descriptions etc are unique, if i have been hit by Panda the site should escape its clutches quite quickly ? **OR ** Is Panda as aggressive as Penguin in which case is it best to start again on a new domain ? Many Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Beating big brands for rankings on Google page 1 post Panda & Penguin
Hi all, so having followed lots of SeoMoz guidelines that we have read here and standard SEO ideas we seem to no longer be able to rank for our core keywords.. and certainly not rank in front of the big brands. We're a small eCommerce company and have historically ranked Google positions 1-4 for many of our keywords (a year or two ago)... but now no where near this any more. We always write unique content for our products of usually around 300-400 words per product we include our keywords in Title, meta description and H1 tags. We include buyers guides and set up articles on the site and generally have a reasonable amount of good quality and always uniquely written content Recently we have concentrated to ensure that page load speed is above average and Google Web Master Tools page speed gives us around 80-90 out of 100 We carry out linking and have always done... in the most recent past this has been weighted towards 'content for links' to gain purely incoming links (although in the early days from 2005 we did swap links with other web masters as well as write and publish on article sites etc). product category pages have an intro piece of text that includes the key phrases for that page and is placed as close to the body tag as possible. From what I understand if you are hit by Panda or Penguin the drop off is invariably over night, but we have not seen this... more of a gradual decline over the last year or two (although there was a bit of a downward blip on Panda update 20). Now we're lucky to be on page 2 for what were our main keywords / phrases such as "portable DVD players" or "portable DVD player"... in front of us in every position is a big national brand.. and certainly on page 1 it is purely only a big brand in every postion. They don't have great info from what we can see for these keywords and certainly don't give as much info as we do. For the phrase "portable DVD player" our portable DVD accessories page ranks better than our actual portable DVD player category page... which we also can't understand? This is our portable DVD category page: http://www.3wisemonkeys.co.uk/portable-dvd-players-car Currently we're starting to produce 2 minute product demo videos for as many of our product detail pages as we can and we plan to host these on something such as Vimeo so that content will be unique to our site (rather than YouTube) in order to give us a different format of unique content on many of our product detail pages to improve rankings (and conversion rates as the same time ideally). So ... I am hoping that some one out there can point us in the right direction and shed some light on our declining positions. Are we doing or have done something wrong... or is it in these post Panda / Penguin days extremely difficult for a small business to beat the big brands as Google believes these are what every one wants to see when shopping? Thanks for any comments and / or help.
Technical SEO | | jasef0 -
Hotel affiliate website - noindex pages with little unique content?
We are well into development of a hotel affiliate website (using Expedia Affiliate Network), and I know there are many challenges to SEO when using an affiliate system - one of the biggest being how to handle duplicate content. Outside of blog posts and static marketing pages, the majority of the textual content is contained in hotel descriptions. We will be creating unique descriptions over time, but we are a small team and this will be a lengthy process. My question for you mozzers, is whether or not it's advisable for ranking purposes to noindex any page with mostly 'stock' content, and only allow Google to index hotel pages with unique descriptions? Thanks for any input!
Technical SEO | | CassisGroup0 -
Pagerank panda rebound
First, I want to say thank you to the support i've been getting from everyone in this community over the last few months. Im glad to be a part of something that isnt full of flammers and haters... and happy late 4th of july... I implemented canonical tags on a clients website (job board with tons of job postings) and the pagerank has almost immediately rebounded from 2.3 - 4.6. it was a little higher pre-panda, but im happy with the rebound. has anyone had experience on how long it usually takes for the keyword rankings to rebound after changes are made? google recached the site this morning, but im still waiting to see traffic bumps. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | malachiii0 -
Does google recognize original content when affiliates use xml-feeds of this content
Hi, Concerning the upcoming (We're from the Netherlands) Panda release: -Could the fact that our affiliates use XML-feeds of our content effect our rankings in some way -Is it possible to indicate to google that content is yours? Kind regards, Dennis Overbeek dennis@acsi.eu | ACSI publishing | www.suncamp.nl | www.eurocampings.eu
Technical SEO | | SEO_ACSI0