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Fine, Stupid Question Time

by timber
6 replies
Hi everyone, I hope it's okay to ask this stupid question, but I'm fairly sure I looked everywhere in here and online, and can't seem to get an answer one way or another.

As an affiliate marketer, I know that Google doesn't like me. Fine, But I recently made a site that, as I understand them, comply with Google's policies. Original content, policies and disclaimers, etc... the only part that is not within thier guidelines, (and this is the trap) is when a customer decides,
"Okay, I like this, I'll buy it" and they get thier credit card, click on the buy button, and, as the only way I know how to do it, they get sent to the vendor's order page.
Google says that because I am sending them to another domain, that I am a bridge site, and they don't like that.

How do I get around this one? I could load the purchase page in a frame, but then that's sneaky and a little black-hat in my opinion.

I know this can't be the first time this has come up in here as a question, to so please, a little help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
#domian #fine #google slap #purchase #question #stupid #time
  • Profile picture of the author williamrs
    First, who said that Google hates you?! Well, it doesn't hate me and I'm an affiliate, too!

    Some marketers have been spreding this wrong information a lot during the past few months. Well, it's not true. Google just want to protect their users from crap and scams, and it has nothing to do with affiliates specifically.

    Google had to create the famous "Slap" because they were losing money and credibility. People were not clicking their ads anymore because they knew they would find useless content on the other side. For Google, the math is simple: less clicks means less money. So they decided to "slap" everybody (not only affiliates!) who was running campaigns to promote crap.

    So, basically, you can keep running your campaigns as long as they offer relevant information to the user. You won't have problems with Google.

    That said, let me try to answer your question...


    Google will try to prevent everything that can be considered black/grey-hat or that may give the advertiser the chance to fool the visitors delivered by Google. So if you have created your own sales page, but is sending people to another domain when they hit the buy button you will have problems. This is not a good practice, because people can use this technique to do several black-hat things (e.g. sell one product and deliver another, send people to a black-hat site that will capture their information, etc). So you can't do it when working with Google.

    Your technique using an iframe is not likely to work, either. I'm not sure about it since I have never tried something similar, and there is a chance that it could work, but, probably, Google won't like that for the same reasons.

    So what can you do? What everybody does! Don't send people from your site directly to the payment page, let they visit the product's sales page first, and then make the purchase. You can use a preselling page or a review page to do it.


    William
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  • Profile picture of the author timber
    William;
    thank you for your reply, I understand that it is just a situational thing, and not an outright hatred, although it feels personal sometimes.\

    The thing is, that's what I was doing. I offered a guitar lessons review site, reviewing 3 diffrent services. each one had the pros and cons listed on my page, and two links. If the customer wanted to visit the services official site, direct link to that site, with my affiliate link attached. (isn't that what it's there for?)
    Second button, was a "Buy Now" button, and if they chose that button, they would go directly to the vendors order form.

    Yes, both buttons changed the domain, but it was going to the page that they expected to go to. For a service or site that they expected to get to.

    how else am I supposed to do it? The way it was explained to me, was that if a customer comes to your site, then after clicking on 'anything' get's re-directed to another domain, then im a 'bridge marketer', and that's bad.

    I'm sure you can see how frustrating this is. Short of putting a shopping cart onto my own page, which I have no idea how to do, I'm completely flustered and confused.

    Sorry if Im ranting, I'm rather verclempt!

    Thanks again for your advice, But my only question is if you were in my shoes, how would you fix this contradiction?

    Thanks.
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    • Profile picture of the author Murderface
      Originally Posted by timber View Post

      The way it was explained to me, was that if a customer comes to your site, then after clicking on 'anything' get's re-directed to another domain, then im a 'bridge marketer', and that's bad.
      -What do you think Google Adsense is?

      If you're overly concerned about directing traffic to a 'purchase' page, then don't. Simply direct them to a 'sales' page.

      Are you doing Adwords/Adsense with your CPA?

      If not, just do as already suggested...create a site that has more than 5 pages of original content (although, from the sound of things, you probably won't even need that). However, If you're going to focus on SEO - building more relevant pages will only benefit you. Remember - useful/unique content.

      -M
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  • Profile picture of the author timber
    Anyone? Please? Hello?

    What do I do when Google says I am a bad guy when I send a willing customer to my vendors sales page? Are they upset because it changes domain names? What do I do? Help? Please?
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    • Profile picture of the author ben565
      google classifies a bridge page as a single web page where the whole purpose of your website is to get the customer to click through to the vendors site,if you create a blog with multiple pages of relevent content then you will be giving value to the user and google not just getting the user to click.

      Also add privacy,contact,terms and about us pages as well and you should have no problems.
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  • Profile picture of the author williamrs
    First, I'm not sure if it's ok you have a link pointing to the order page, but maybe this is not your major problem. Maybe another Warrior who have already tried it can give you more accurate information.

    Anyway, Ben is correct. If you have a website with just one page that has the only purpose of taking people to another site, then you have a bridge page. When creating campaigns with Google you need to send people to a real website, with at least 10 - 15 content pages and other extra pages such as contact, about, resources, privacy policy, disclaimer, etc.

    If you do it, you will hardly have problems with Google.


    William
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