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Thin Content Affiliate?

by y0kkles
1 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I believe one of the reasons that my pages on coadb dot com are not ranking well is because Google looks at me as a "thin content affiliate".

To that end, I've hired two content writers to write unique surname histories for each name. So that solves the "thin part".

But I'm unable to solve the "affiliate" part. Each surname page will link to Zazzle 1 to 15 times (depending on how much products I show). To solve this, I've asked Zazzle if I can process the orders on my own domain, that way Google will never know I'm an affiliate. They said no, and so have most of Zazzle's competitors.

Is there anyway I can generate the zazzle affiliate links dynamically? What I mean by that is when a visitor comes to my page and views my source code, there is no link to zazzle.com, but if they click the Buy button, a link to Zazzle gets generated on the fly. That way the customer still can get to Zazzle from my website, but if Google were to crawl my site, they wouldn't see any links to Zazzle.

Is that a good idea? Or is that grey/black that will get me banned from Google? Is what I described considered cloaking?

How do you recommend I solve this conundrum? I want to use Zazzle as my order/prining/shipping company.
#affiliate #content #thin
  • Profile picture of the author irawr
    Banned
    Originally Posted by y0kkles View Post

    How do you recommend I solve this conundrum? I want to use Zazzle as my order/prining/shipping company.
    No idea. That's pretty much a great example of a thin affiliate site. I wouldn't worry too much, the main thing is to not be "spammy." The thin affiliate penalties are manual, so as long as you don't draw too much attention to the site they won't care. When trying to figure out if a site is "thin" always ask yourself, am I taking information and "spreading it out" for the purpose of SEO (or Affiliate Marketing.) Unfortunately with a site like that I don't think you really have any alternatives, but to do exactly that.

    Make sure you nofollow all your affiliate links, try to hide them behind some kind of link beautification plugin, make sure you have them all be consistently in the same virtual /folder/ then use robots.txt to block Googlebot from going to that folder and it shouldn't do anything algorithmic.

    So all your affiliate links look like
    Code:
    http://www.mysite.com/outgoinglink/link
http://www.mysite.com/outgoinglink/link2
    Ban Gbot from
    Code:
    http://www.mysite.com/outgoinglink/
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