My datafeed powered affiliate websites die after 3 weeks
-
Ok, so I've been trying something new lately:
There are tons of datafeeds from webshops available on all the major affiliate networks. We thought it might be a nice idea to implement these datafeeds into your own little 'whitelabel' webshop with the power of Wordpress and a couple of plugins that help automate this process.
So what we've did is this:
-
Get a domain that is relative to the shop or products we're promoting.
-
Install Wordpress with a plugin that enables you to import the datafeed for those products from 1 or more webshops on the affiliate networks.
-
Each product gets an unique text by an article spinner of about a thousand words. The text on each product page is about 85% different than the others because of a massive synonym list. But each text makes perfect sense and is perfectly readable by humans.
-
We let the system add about 20-30 pages per day so we're not flooding Google with hundreds or thousands of new pages per day because that would lead to a direct penalty.
-
The sites look good, unique and look not much different than your average comparison site. They also have privacy policy's, contact information, newsletter subscription, sitemap, about us and all that stuff.
-
We have masked the affiliate links because I know a lot of affiliate links might ring the alarm at Google.
So overall these sites are pretty solid and look good (enough). But here is the problem: We have tried 5 of those sites so far and every time the same thing happens: the site gets indexed, gets some visitors, then quickly builds to about 20-30 visitors a day in 2-4 weeks and then BAM, it's over. Google drops the bomb on us.
The sites do not get banned from the index, but they just drop a couple of hundred positions to where they don't get any traffic at all anymore. Every single time this has happened and only in 1 occasion the site "rose from the death" and came back again, but we do not know for how long this will last.
So, do you have any idea what the cause of this might be? There is only one thing left I can think of and that's the age of the domain. They were all newly registered, but still, it's weird that they do work for a while and then get dropped.
2 examples of my sites are: http://www.veromodashoponline.nl and http://www.converseonline.nl (sites are in Dutch). Please help!
-
-
Hi Guillaume.
I would like to help you and I feel the best way to do so is really clarify what you are asking. I have read your Q&A and looked at your site. Here is how your question reads to me:
"We are trying to create a bunch of websites, then manipulate search engine results so our sites rank well. We have taken many steps to fool the search engines, but they seem to keep catching us in a matter of weeks. How can we fool the search engines?"
You may disagree with that summary, but you will be hard pressed to convince me, or more importantly the search engines of anything different.
The best practice is to create a single, well designed site. All the text should be manually written word by word. A human needs to write all of the text.
Pretend for a moment you only have one website. Pour your heart and soul into that website. Build it to be the best website on the planet for your product or service. The website will then become "real" both to search engines and your customers. Search engines have billions of dollars invested in search quality. Even if you do manage to fool them, it is only a matter of time until they figure out any manipulation and penalize your site.
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
-
Can 302 chains (affiliate links) from "toxic" sources hurt you? Or are you "shielded"?
Hi, I'm going through some affiliate links, which send visitors to our website via a chain of several 302 redirects Some of them are relevant links, others perhaps not so much. I know that Google doesn't pass PageRank on 302s... But are they still considered valid links that pass, let's say, "reputation", "relevance", "link neighbourhood" kind of signals? Otherwise put, is a 302 similar to adding the "nofollow" attribute on a link? Sort of? Not at all? More succinctly put, should I be worried about "toxic" sources separated from us by 302 redirect chains? By the way, yes I recognize that (Google's 302 redirect chain handling aside) associating our brand with perhaps what some might consider spammy websites is not in general a good move; I'm concerned with the technical SEO implications here however. In fact, this technical information may very well help drive decisions/policies on where we allow our affiliate advertising to appear. Thanks 🙂 PS - The affiliate company by the way is cj.com if that helps
Affiliate Marketing | | ntcma0 -
Which is the Best Affiliate Marketing Platform in Australia?
We have 1 eCommerce website (www.bannerbuzz.com.au) for printing products like banners, signs, banner stands, teardrop flags and more... We want to start affiliate marketing for our products with CPA model. So, Do anyone have a good experience with Australian affiliate marketing platform. We are having shareasale account for our USA based website, But Shareasale is not that much aggressive in Australia. So we want to finalize 1 platform for affiliate marketing which can have good strength of advertisers and reputation. Thanks,
Affiliate Marketing | | CommercePundit0 -
Affiliate program links
Hello, I've question regarding affiliate partner generated links.Company www.example.com has a affiliate program. Partner www.example2.com links to the company site with affiliate link www.example.com/?affid=xxxx in banner, article etc. As I understand these type of links could hurt our Company site, so I asked partners to use rel="nofollow" in all links where they link to us usign ?affid=xxxx in url. To be 100% sure that I did the right thing I decided to post here my question. Could these type of links hurt our Company site? Regards,
Affiliate Marketing | | juris_l
Juris0 -
Affiliate URLs Indexed in Google
We have an active in-house affiliate program which has a create-a-link function where affiliate, as in most affiliate programs, can build links back to our content to produce sales. The problem that I am seeing is that some of the affiliate URL versions are being indexed in Google rather than the original page. For instance.. http://www.ourdomain.com/page_start.aspx?affnum=F025212&Start_Page=RaceCar&referrer=createlink is outranking... http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar This presents 2 issues for us. First, this presents duplicate content issues obviously. Second, we pay our affiliates a portion of the sales so, in order to maximize profitability, we'd like the indexed pages to be the original version. What's the best way to handle this? I want to make sure that affiliates continue to get credit for links from their sites but search engine links should go to the original versions.
Affiliate Marketing | | ATIseo0 -
Duplicate tracking of Affiliate and Organic orders
I started diving into the over lap between Organic and affiliate orders and can see that on average about 10% of my organic orders get tracked as both affiliate and organic (meaning i am paying affiliate commissions on them). I want to be able to better account for the different types of order and where they are coming from. My question is simply if anyone has any ideas as to how better to figure out if those orders should be canceled on the affiliate end or if there is a better way in analytics to see where the order is actually getting attributed to through some type of goal or advanced set up or something (the download of orders from organic that I compared to the affiliate ones was taken from Ecommerce > Transactions > Medium (Organic) then I compared that to the order numbers from the affiliate company I am using). Hope this makes sense and thanks for any information that can help with this!
Affiliate Marketing | | Gordian0 -
What is the negative effect of getting affiliate links to your domain?
Are the negative effects of affiliate links to your domain bigger than the positive effects? Is it better to use a subdomain for your affiliate campaigns? (Because of linkprofile no follow links or time on page effects?) Thanks for responce!
Affiliate Marketing | | ltom0 -
How should I deal with the affiliate URLs we create through our affiliate program?
Our website offers an affiliate program and every affiliate gets a link http://www.ourwebsite.com/?affiliateID. Because we get many such links we use redirects to avoid duplicate content. Unfortunately we have 302 redirects set up and I want to make them 301. Many of our affiliates build backlinks using their http://www.ourwebsite.com/?affiliateID as the URL. If such links were redirected through a 301, would they pass any juice? Can our site get penalized by search engines for having backlinks to URLs that contain affiliate IDs, URLs that are 301 redirected to our homepage lets say?
Affiliate Marketing | | nick.leech0 -
URL Tags / Affiliate tracking help
1. If I give a sales rep a unique tag to put at the end of a URL for tracking purposes, will Google index the "www.mysite.com/service.html?unique-tag" version of a page and display it in search results? 2. Would a tool like Xenu be able to find that version of a URL? Reason for questions: If I give my sales people tags with their names in them, I don't want competitors poaching my sales people by search for all URLs on my domain. Follow up: are there any other potential issues that I should think about? Thanks!
Affiliate Marketing | | pbhatt0