robots.txt optimization for clickbank product

jminkler 13 years ago

Originally Posted by shabbirbhimani

I will not suggest to block the URL's with robots.txt but use Canonical URL's instead for your sales page.

Better yet, use a directory

example.com/recommends/xxxxx

this way you can just turn off the directory in the robots
- Thanks
- 2 replies
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- shabbirbhimani 13 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by jminkler
  
  Better yet, use a directory
  
  example.com/recommends/xxxxx
  
  this way you can just turn off the directory in the robots
  
  You can do that only for outgoing links but not for the incoming affiliates links.
  
  Thanks
  
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- Cash Money Hosting 13 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by jminkler
  
  Better yet, use a directory
  
  example.com/recommends/xxxxx
  
  this way you can just turn off the directory in the robots
  
  This can be achieved by using a Free Link Cloaker
  
  Thanks
  
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jminkler

13 years ago

Originally Posted by marmalade

Hey,

I am a clickbank vendor and some of my affiliates' URL's were getting indexed in google as part of my website. When I did a google search for my website using site:example.com, some URL's like the following would show up:

example.com/?hop=AFFID

Which is problematic, of course. I do not want those to be indexed.

So my initial question was gonna be how I'd remove that with robots.txt, but now when I do a site:example.com search, all the affiliate URL's are gone, i.e. no longer indexed as part of my website. So I am confused...

I have made no changes to robots.txt

Could this de-indexing of the problematic URL's be because I added a google sitemap from within google webmaster tools, and google now sees exactly which URL's are part of my site, and which ones are just duplicates?

Either way, I'm happy they seem to be gone from Google's index.

Can someone confirm this is how it works, and I'm sorry if it's the wrong forum. Thanks.

I don't think google is counting these as different "pages" since they are all the same page (index.php) with a GET parameter

ie. example.com/index.php?hop=XXX is the same as your example
as is example.com/index.php?hop=YYYY

Google isn't going to make separate links on the search for these since they are the same page (index.php)

That is why you use mod_rewrite to make them point to

example.com/hop/XXX (if you did want them to be indexed)

Thanks
1 reply

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shabbirbhimani 13 years ago

Originally Posted by jminkler

That is why you use mod_rewrite to make them point to

example.com/hop/XXX (if you did want them to be indexed)

That would mean all those links will have duplicate content.
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- marmalade 13 years ago
  
  Thanks everyone for replying. It doesn't seem like it's necessary to add anything to the robots.txt in this case. I don't see a lot of other vendors doing it anyway.
  
  Thanks
  
  1 reply
  
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  vendor 13 years ago
  
  Hello Guys
  I wanted to add to this issue.
  This would be my first post on Warrior as i have been a passive
  observer up until now .
  This issue described in the post is a serious one and i have been trying
  to deal with it for ages now.
  I have several vendor sites on CB and some are in the top 100 vendors
  and this issue effects all my sites at clickbank.
  The thing is that google indexes the affiliate url's inside the domain name
  and this process happened eventually to all my sites causing major seo damage to all of them.
  Now here is the kicker . My sites are well indexed on google but
  the indexing changes every few months for the homepage (the one i am sending the affiliate hoplinks to)
  from
  (sorry i cant post links because of less than 15 posts)
  mysite . com
  to
  mysite . com /?id= affid
  
  Once this happens and the site is indexed with an affiliate trail the homepage of the site loses ALL IT'S GOOGLE KEYWORD RANKINGS.
  this situation continues until for some reason google again indexes
  my site homepage as
  mysite . com
  at which point my site gets all it's keyword ranking
  again but this lasts only until the next time the site is indexed
  as "mysite . com /?id= affid"
  in which point the homepage loses all it's google keyword rankings again.
  
  This vicious cycle has been going on and off for ages now while for the most part my site are always indexed with an affiliate trail added to the homepage which means most of the time my homepage is not indexed with the good keyword rankings it should have.
  
  I also observed this happen to several other clickbank vendors.
  for example (not my site) google
  www fullmovies . com (sorry about the spaces i can't post links)
  you will find their website is indexed with a CB hoplink on it .From my personal experience this means this vendor has lost all the major rankings for his homepage until the google spider indexes it properly again.
  
  I also discussed this with clickbank themselves and they were clueless on how to resolve the issue, nevertheless all my sites have been affected
  and this is a widespread issue for many other CB vendors even if they do not realise it is.
  It is as if once the homepage is indexed with a CB affiliate id attached to it google penalizes the homepage for rankings on SEO.
  
  I would appreciate any advise that could be given to resolve this issue.
  
  Regards
  
  Thanks
  
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Harrison_Uhl

13 years ago

Cloak your incoming affiliate links by changing them to xyz.com/inCloaked/affCode and use .htaccess to rewrite URL's. See WordPress permalinks. This requires that you show your affiliates the alternate link encoding you want.

Or at least make a separate landing page for incoming hops. Once the affiliate code is registered, you can redirect them to the home page. This will prevent Google from seeing cgi arguments in links to your website's home page.

Harrison

Thanks

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webfighter

13 years ago

You just need to add rel="canonical" page to your page(s). More information:
About rel="canonical" - Webmaster Tools Help

Thanks
1 reply

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vendor 13 years ago

Originally Posted by webfighter

You just need to add rel="canonical" page to your page(s). More information:

Thx
im trying out your method and update if anything changes..
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- GetFeeDomainName 13 years ago
  
  indeed, add
  
  HTML Code:
  
  <link rel="canonical" href="/desired/path" />
  
  to all your pages (or just your index, /), or instead use Google Webmaster Tools and under Site configuration > URL parameters add the unwanted GET parameters that appear in your links (e.g. id, hop, etc.).
  both methods will work, the latter is a bit less hassle, I think.
  
  Thanks
  
  Signature
  
  ( get a free domain name )
  
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robots.txt optimization for clickbank product

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