Penalty for Affiliates

14 years ago

In a word, 'yes'. Google seems to have less respect for a page that refers someone to another site for a solution. At least from what I have seen and been told.

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Troy_Phillips

14 years ago

I have seen just the opposite on adsense . Sites that were in the middle of the first page have quickly went to number one and adsense was the only change .

These were not made for adsense sites , each have a lot of real content .

You can bet your bottom dollar your outgoing links determine ranking . That is why I only do affiliate marketing through email marketing .

Give them a freebie that relates to the affiliate product you are selling , let the ar do the rest and keep google happy .

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theemperor

14 years ago

Watch out for the "Google Dance"

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Why9999

14 years ago

Originally Posted by theemperor

Watch out for the "Google Dance"

Sounds like the trots to me?

No, I think you're advising me not to become a link whore?

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theemperor

14 years ago

During the month, Google sends out robots (spiders) to crawl the web and archive every website it finds. These archived websites will be presented in the next update of the Google index (database). The update process is initiated every 30 days or so, although on some occasions there have been more than 30 days between updates. Now if you've been a keen Google fan you'll know that they have 3 main www servers online, which are as follows:
www.google.com - The main address, the true homepage of google.
www2.google.com - Thought to be a test server.
www3.google.com - Thought to be a test server.
Whilst nobody outside of "Google" truly seems to know the purpose of the www2 & www3 servers, many people have come to the assumption that they are test servers. During the update, which takes several days, the 3 Google servers display different results. Whilst the results vary from server to server, they are said to be "dancing", hence the name "Google Dance".

Source: Google Dance Tool

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Why9999

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Troy_Phillips

I have seen just the opposite on adsense . Sites that were in the middle of the first page have quickly went to number one and adsense was the only change .

These were not made for adsense sites , each have a lot of real content .

You can bet your bottom dollar your outgoing links determine ranking . That is why I only do affiliate marketing through email marketing .

Give them a freebie that relates to the affiliate product you are selling , let the ar do the rest and keep google happy .

Wow! That's sobering. So you would advise removing all affiliate links from your site obviously? Have you seen that give a nice boost to your site(s) rather quickly?

From what you've seen, does it affect the site overall or only the ranking of the page with the affiliate link in it?

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1 reply

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Troy_Phillips

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Why9999

Wow! That's sobering. So you would advise removing all affiliate links from your site obviously? Have you seen that give a nice boost to your site(s) rather quickly?

From what you've seen, does it affect the site overall or only the ranking of the page with the affiliate link in it?

I saw a site I had ranked number one go to page nine . I thought I could ride out the dance .

30 days later I took the links off and within two days I was at 4 on page one .

The links were all on a page that was not even in my menu. I was using this page to send my list to.

Now you could make the page no follow and deny access to the spiders to the page . I just use a free hosted site now to send my list to it for affiliate products .

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Why9999

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Troy_Phillips

I saw a site I had ranked number one go to page nine . I thought I could ride out the dance .

30 days later I took the links off and within two days I was at 4 on page one .

The links were all on a page that was not even in my menu. I was using this page to send my list to.

Now you could make the page no follow and deny access to the spiders to the page . I just use a free hosted site now to send my list to it for affiliate products .

This is so strange. I can't believe that I have not read about this before. I bet I've read several hundred pages discussing how to use affiliates, where to find affiliates, how to monetize using affiliates, etc., etc. and yet NONE of them ever warned that an affiliate link might hurt your page ranking.

Are people that ignorant or are they blinded by greed or living in denial or what?

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DavidGordon 14 years ago

Hi - I'm new here.
I remember reading that the number of links into your site will increase the ranking? Does that sound familiar? Seems odd that linking to another site will bring down your ranking but having one way links to your own site increases it. It kind of encourages a lack of cooperation don't you think?

David
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Troy_Phillips

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Why9999

This is so strange. I can't believe that I have not read about this before. I bet I've read several hundred pages discussing how to use affiliates, where to find affiliates, how to monetize using affiliates, etc., etc. and yet NONE of them ever warned that an affiliate link might hurt your page ranking.

Are people that ignorant or are they blinded by greed or living in denial or what?

You need to remember this is what my experience has been , The gospel according to Troy is ... according to Troy.

I am sure that there are people that have the exact opposite results as me and also have a personal experience to back it up .

Having said that ... It has happened to me and in my business model .. me is pretty important .

Being a list builder first, a producer second, and thirdly an affiliate marketer , my business model could be completely non-relative to you .

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EvcRo

14 years ago

Seems somehow natural that websites with no intentions to sell/make money (non profit) to have a higher "weight".

1 year ago i made a website with only articles on it, no adsense or outgoing links, just original articles. Got PR3 in 2 months without building 1 (one) backlink. Must be some truth in this ...

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Zeus66

14 years ago

Beware tiny sample size in any test. Extrapolating and making broad conclusions based on a handful of experiences and anecdotal evidence is folly. I've had Adsense + affiliate links on sites for years and have not seen any detrimental ranking effects, nor any improvements by removing anything link-wise. But I too am just one person (albeit nearly 200 sites over those years).

Having said that, I do see a significant benefit to adding outbound non-affiliate links to sites that Google values. Keep it related to the topic of the content on that particular page and Google will reward you. And there are smart reasons to cloak your outbound affiliate links as a general rule, regardless of search engine rankings.

John

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Why9999 14 years ago

Originally Posted by Zeus66

And there are smart reasons to cloak your outbound affiliate links as a general rule, regardless of search engine rankings.

Do you mind sharing what you mean here? Why would you want to hide affiliate links?
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- Zeus66 14 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Why9999
  
  Do you mind sharing what you mean here? Why would you want to hide affiliate links?
  
  Because perception matters. Some visitors will not click a link that's obviously an affiliate link. I think that's silly, but then I'm a marketer and not just a consumer. Mine is not to question them. Mine is to give them what they want to make more sales. And if more of them will click a link that reads 'bluewidgets.com/buywidgets' instead of 'amazon.com/aiadiad/aoghah?w9eeld=304050?alghadd' - so be it. They'll still end up at the same location. So the more I can get there the better. As long as they can easily find what they clicked that link to find, everybody wins.
  
  John
  
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zoobie

14 years ago

I don't believe this is what called penalty and it shouldn't be... I think it happens just by coincidence and it is called Google dance.

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Why9999 14 years ago

Originally Posted by zoobie

I don't believe this is what called penalty and it shouldn't be... I think it happens just by coincidence and it is called Google dance.

Random perturbations in the space time flux, eh?

Well, I can experiment pretty easily with adsense in particular as those are all in include files.

Removing affiliate links will be a bit more work.

The bottom line is that I'm probably going to test these out for awhile even though I don't want to do things based on the "Google Dance"...
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skullzzz

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Why9999

About a fourth of my pages have Amazon a link or two of Amazon affiliate pages and I'm wondering if that could possibly be causing me problems. By the way, I realize the page optimization and other SEO parameters are the most important factors in page ranking and consider these things "tweaking" or "fine tuning".

Simple solution here would be to test a page or two by removing the affiliate links, right? See if they move up quicker in the SERPs.

Regardless of affiliate links, make sure you have an opt-in option on every page.

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1 reply

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Why9999

14 years ago

Originally Posted by skullzzz

Simple solution here would be to test a page or two by removing the affiliate links, right? See if they move up quicker in the SERPs.

Regardless of affiliate links, make sure you have an opt-in option on every page.

Opt in option? What do you mean?

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kevinfar

14 years ago

Originally Posted by Why9999

Opt in option? What do you mean?

I guess he wanted to say opt in form...

And yes, no matter what, always have that on your page. Because when you have THE LIST, it doesn't really matter what google does to your site if you have people who follow what you do through emails.

Kevin

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Why9999

14 years ago

Originally Posted by kevinfar

I guess he wanted to say opt in form...

And yes, no matter what, always have that on your page. Because when you have THE LIST, it doesn't really matter what google does to your site if you have people who follow what you do through emails.

Kevin

Are you guys talking about collecting a mailing list or an rss feed or what?

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skullzzz 14 years ago

Originally Posted by Why9999

Opt in option? What do you mean?

Yes, some way for them to opt in to your list; on every page.
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- Why9999 14 years ago
  
  For posterity and future generations:
  
  Removing adsense from my site has definitely helped my rankings. I am now getting ranked on a wide variety of smaller searches and it has increased my traffic roughly 20-25% I would say.
  
  I have done a little blog commenting, so that could possibly be it, but I really doubt it because I was not that effective at it, i.e. many of comments were removed, changed to nofollow, etc.
  
  I sell an ebook, so this should pay off in the long run, i.e. I make more from my ebook than from adsense.
  
  Thanks
  
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Chris Thompson

14 years ago

This is interesting, and I wonder if anyone has done any larger scale testing of the concept.

Imagine a test:

1) Pick 5 pairs (10 total) of equally good domain names that use the same keyword in them.
2) Write 10 articles for each site, an original and a re-write.
3) Post them at the same time, targeting some long tail keywords that you know will be "easy" to rank for.
4) Add some affiliate links to half of the sites.
5) Social bookmark using the same method

Do nothing else.

Check rankings after 1 week, 1 month, etc.
Then SWAP the affiliate links to the other half of the sites and check again after 1 week, 1 month.

If I had bench time for my outsourcers, I'd do this test ... it would be pretty easy. Unfortunately they are busy. But if anyone wants to do this it might make for an interesting "free report" that you could use later to build a list.

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larmr

14 years ago

I think balance is the key, if you're site promotes just physical product as an affiliate then have some information regarding those products - i.e. how it can help.

Too much ads renders websites unreadable and garbage anyway, specially adsense everywhere.

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kindsvater

14 years ago

From my experience I'd say that the newer the site the more important it is to hide those affiliate links. However, once a website has aged, and Google has hopefully concluded that it is an authoritative page, I have never seen any ranking problems after adding Adsense or affiliate links.

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Why9999

14 years ago

Originally Posted by kindsvater

From my experience I'd say that the newer the site the more important it is to hide those affiliate links. However, once a website has aged, and Google has hopefully concluded that it is an authoritative page, I have never seen any ranking problems after adding Adsense or affiliate links.

First of all, I'm not talking about Affiliate links. The only thing I removed was adsense.

My site is about four years old and all I can say is that I am ranking where I never ranked before. In the last three days I have been getting hits from a half dozen new keyword combinations. It seem very coincidental.

Of course, what I need to do is test it by putting adsense back in, but I"m enjoying the new traffic so much that I'm scared to do it!

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Penalty for Affiliates

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