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
-
What's the best way to go about making Duplicate Content Pages on my domain for affiliates?
Hello, I would like to make a bunch of duplicate pages of my site's Home Page, that way affiliates of mine can have a page of their own with links specialized to themselves littered throughout the page. What's the best practice going about this without jeopardizing domain authority from tons of duplicate content signals firing off?
Affiliate Marketing | | Benavest0 -
Will GA Autotrack affect affiliate sites not using autotrack?
I want to add autotrack.js to affiliate quote forms hosted on my site. However, I do not know how it will affect affiliate websites (not associated with my quote forms, but with the same Google Analytics code, that do not use autotrack. I read that "Autotrack is not an official Google Analytics product and does not qualify for GA Premium". Will it harm my affiliates in any way to have autotrack on their quote form but not on their websites? It will have their GA website tracking number.
Affiliate Marketing | | RoxBrock0 -
Im running a campaign for a coupon site, coupons are added and expire weekly. What are the most important factors you think I should focus on
Coupon sites are unique as the content is fluid, coupons expire weekly, categories have thin content but the main goal is to get the merchants Macy's, Target, Best Buy coupons and indexed. Im looking for advice on technical SEO that may be unique to feed and affiliate site, what to block in the robots.txt ie affiliate urls such as /go and /gostore and categories Any advice and passionate discussion is welcome...
Affiliate Marketing | | 100percentorganicseo0 -
New to Affiliates Programs - Any advice?
Hi, I've no background knowledge of affiliate programs and am wondering if this would be a good idea for our company, www.vintageheirloom.com? We sell for the most part expensive, vintage bags and jewellery. Would an affiliates program be appropriate or possibly annoy and hinder customer loyalty rather than promote it? I'm using WP with Woocommerce and have seen a plugin that connects Woocommerce with Ambassador. Does anyone have any previous experience with this company, worked well, any things to watch out for etc. One issue that puzzles me if that I get the idea that you can put a tracking code on say a 3rd party blog banner, person clicks and buy product, that gets tracked. But what if customer abandons sale, comes back later directly to site and purchases? I'm guessing this isn't tracked. Is that right? As an aside I've a blogger friend who I'd like to pay for sending traffic that leads to sales. Is this the best way to track? Would the addition of 'How did you hear about us' question during 'Add to cart' process be a back up method? Any downsides to that, other than customer ignoring it? Thanks a lot for looking & any suggestions you may have! Kevin
Affiliate Marketing | | well-its-1-louder0 -
How to prevent affiliates from bringing negative SEO?
Hi there, I'm just about to integrate iDevAffiliate network for one of my sites, however it occurred to me that affiliates may (unfortunately) resort to black hat methods without me becoming aware of it, which could pass negative link juice to my site. Is there any way to use affiliate networks such as iDev without causing this problem? I was thinking of simply using a different URL, but the problem is that 301 redirects won't mitigate the issue. Thanks!
Affiliate Marketing | | freeunlocks0 -
Track orders from different affiliate platforms.
Hi there, I have an online shop and I want to sell my products trough various affiliate platforms. How can I track from wich platform a sale is made so I don't have to pay all the affiliates? Is there any software on the market? The money is not a problem, I'm not looking only for free options, I'm looking for the best one. Thank you, Romeo.
Affiliate Marketing | | RomeoMadrid0 -
I need some feedback on the value of affiliate aggregators like Link Share
My company decided to start a Link Share affiliate program at the beginning of this year. I've had serious reservations about the value of the program since the beginning but was overruled. Here are my concerns: The majority of publishers seem to be coupon scraper sites or borderline link farms I am told the biggest revenue earners in our network are publishing articles about my company with links back to our site but if they are Google Alerts sure isn't finding them and a manual search hasn't turned up anything either. This makes me think these publishers are using some sort of unsavory way to drive traffic to our site or maybe even cookie traffic that was coming to our site anyway in order to get credit for the sale. Most of all I'd like to hear from anyone else who has used Link Share in the past. Secondly I realize there's not a lot of information here but I'm wondering if this passes the smell test for anyone else. Any feedback would be appreciated.
Affiliate Marketing | | eTundra0 -
In search of the perfect SEO affiliate ID'd URL
Hi, I'm building an affiliate system for our website, and I obviously want to gain as much SEO benifit from it as possible. So I am wondering what the optimal solution is with regard to how an affilaite URL is tagged. After looking into it a bit more - I have come up with the following. 1/. Use an affilaite URL idendifier with a #
Affiliate Marketing | | James77
EG like www.mysite.com#123 2/. 301 redirect the affilaite URL to the "real URL"
EG www.mysite.com#123 301 -> www.mysite.com What do you think of this? Thanks0