International Re-sellers Scrapping My Site Should I be Worried?
-
We are a USA based company and we only sell direct to the US and Canada. However, we have partnered with other companies that are now distributing our products in other places like Australia and Mexico for example. These partners have scrapped our site and have used large chunks of our content to create a website for themselves on their intentional domains (ex.. .au and .mx). How concerned should I be about this? Should I reach out to them and require that they use rel="alternate" hreflang="x" or request the to stop? I have never had to deal with international SEO issues before, so any advice and direction would be appreciated!
-
It's highly unlikely that someone using your content would outrank you for your own content in English in the US. It usually works the other way around - others are commonly filtered out in favor of the original publisher.
You could, in theory, use hreflang tags. This isn't really the intended use, so I'm not sure what the results would be. In order for it to work, you'd both need to reference all the other versions of the page from every pageeither in a sitemap (better idea) or in the . E.g. you point to them as en-cn and they point to your page with en-us and en-ca. Unless you have some extraordinarily savvy partners, this is probably going to be a mess.
Your partners can help avoid the mess above if they go into Webmaster Tools under "Search Traffic >> International Targeting" and choose a location they want to target. All of this is likely unnecessary if they have (for example) a .cn domain and you have a .com domain. Google will probably figure out the most relevant page to show on its own. That's what you're looking for, if I understand correctly.
If you have US/CA partners, your options are more limited, and there's less room to mutually benefit. You can request they canonical back, but that completely eliminates their ranking ability. You could request a link, but even that request might not go over well. (I wouldn't do it) Amazon often outranks the original product sellers - and that's just the price you pay sometimes when you sell through others.
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
-
SEO expert for site
Hey guys, I am looking for an SEO expert for my website. I have talked to a couple different people, but since I know nothing about it, it is hard for me to get a good read on whether they know what they are talking about or not. The main keywords are in the sports betting industry, which I believe to be a highly competitive space. Any advice, suggestions, or recommendations? Thank you
Affiliate Marketing | | MachinesPicks0 -
Affiliate site
I have a client I am doing SEO work for. He sells a system that helps people win at video keno. He sells a system for like $200 that shows people step by step how to play and win. Its a good site and he has a ton of verified winnings. My point in saying that, its not a fly-by-night system he wrote in his basement. I know - gambling, not easy for SEO. I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner. Wouldn't this potentially be perfect for affiliate marketing? He offers a good commission to whoever sends him traffic if they buy. If anybody could direct me to a resource or two that is reputable and would handle as much of the set up and management of this I would be very grateful! Thank you! Matthew
Affiliate Marketing | | Mrupp440 -
Why were all of my Amazon sites deindexed?
March 22nd.. The worst day of my Internet Marketing career. I got the dreaded message: Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.ricecookerreviewz.com/ We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Here's some interesting points: All of the content is unique and highly targeted to each product. Site is around 4-5 months old Every single one of my Amazon sites were hit.. How did they connect my sites together..? Why were they hit? List of some of my deindexed sites: http://www.inversiontablereviewshq.net/ http://www.breadmachinereviewshq.net/ http://www.ricecookerreviewz.com/ http://www.cooker-reviews.com/ http://www.ab-machine-reviews.net/ They are most definitely not, "thin affiliate sites". They have dozens of reviews, tons of articles, recipes, video.. Each site is like this.. I have started over, fresh content from my writers, fresh theme, fresh everything. But still, I would appreciate an answer as to what I'm doing wrong so that I can learn to not make the same mistake. Thanks!
Affiliate Marketing | | leetk3zzer0 -
Does Google look at Domain Registrar owner information when counting links into a site?
Question: If the domain registrar owner info is the same on two websites, will Google/other search engines discredit any linking between the two sites when calculating page rank? We have two company sites. One is our main ecommerce domain which we have been linking into from information domains in the past. We recently cut ties with the company that hosted them for us and wish to host them ourselves to preserve the inbound traffic. We are worried, however, that the traffic will be discredited now that we own both domains. Thanks for looking!
Affiliate Marketing | | tennisexpress0 -
In what ways would an affiliate site be okay with Google?
I know Google has slammed affiliate sites hard. But affiliate marketing can be a real business and had an idea for one, but I would like to know if ALL affiliate sites are looked at as evil in Google's eyes, or if it's just those with thin and duplicate content in the product descriptions. I know they want brands to come up ahead of affiliates of that brand, and that makes sense. If I sold Acme Widgets products, Acme Widgets itself should come up ahead of my site. But what if the site sold widgets in general, with the term widgets not a branded keyword? If all product descriptions are unique and well-written content, on a site that is high quality, would it still be downgraded by Google just because there are affilate links in it? I guess overall the question could be boiled down to, are affiliate sites hit because they have horrible content or because they have links to affiliate programs in them?
Affiliate Marketing | | bizzer0 -
Google Analytics Tracking Pixels for Third-Party sites???
Hello, Does anyone know if it is possible to track an event on a third party site and have it post back to your Google Analytics account? For example, I am sending traffic to a partners site and I want to know if that traffic I am sending them will hit a specific point of conversion (a sale) and I'm wondering if it possible to place a tracking pixel on their thankyou.html page that gets recorded in my google analytics?
Affiliate Marketing | | shawn810 -
International alternatives to Adsense
Hi One of my web site has been banned from Adsense. I am looking for I alternatives. The web site is in French and most of the traffic comes from Canada and France. Any good program to suggest? Thanks a in advance!! Nancy
Affiliate Marketing | | EnigmaSolution0 -
Duplicate versions of pages on my site are getting indexed by Google...I think...
Hello, Our site has a very high bounce rate, which in part is down to a slightly old fashioned design, and also because we are a retailer and I imagine many visitors are simply quickly comparing prices and then leaving. However, having had a look in Google Analytics, I think that there is another issue that is contributing to a very high bounce rate. When I look in Content > Top Content, and order the pages in order of Bounce Rate, high to low, there are hundreds of instances of pages with just one or two visits in the last month, and a 100% bounce rate. The links are the same as our home page or pages on our website, but with extra letters and numbers at the end of the url. We have an affiliate scheme, which provides our affiliates with unique codes for the products they want to link to, and my guess is that these urls are getting indexed. I've looked at a few other links, and they go to translated versions of a page from our website, generated by Google. Other urls seem to have been generated by search results from our own search on the website. What worries me is that there are lots and lots of versions of the same page, with slightly different urls. I am by no means an SEO expert - I work for a very small company and am basically learning as I go - but I know that duplicate content is bad news. If the pages were on our own site, we could use 301s to redirect, but what about translated versions, or urls generated by affiliate schemes, or search results? Many thanks, Sophy
Affiliate Marketing | | sophycolbert0