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Promoting your product via Clickbank - how to get the most SEO benefit (301 redirect?)

by markowe
7 replies
  • SEO
    • |
OK, here's a question - if you list your product on Clickbank for affiliates to promote then they end up linking to your sales page with their hoplink, and that redirects to something like

mysite.com/mysalespage/?aff=superaffiliate

i.e., the same page gets hit with tons of different variations depending on the affiliate ID.

How do you go about capitalising on all those backlinks, because they will get watered down like this, won't they?

I want to do something like detect the presence of that "aff=" (or "ref=", or something, I forget now) and 301 redirect just to mysite.com/mysalespage. Is there any point though? Of course, I want to preserve the affiliate's cookie, but other than that, would this concentrate the SEO benefit in the way I am thinking, or am I barking up the wrong tree (and does it even matter?)
#301 #benefit #clickbank #product #promoting #redirect #seo
  • Profile picture of the author paulgl
    They won't get watered down. Everything after the "?" is a non
    issue. You could type in warriorforum.com/?whateveryouwant
    and it will load in warriorforum.com

    The ?= is for php/mysql or some database reference.

    The link will look like it goes to the domain.com anyway.

    If you don't like the end page having a ?= attached to it,
    then you need to set a cookie, database value, etc.,
    with the id and forward it to the "regular" dot com.

    Some affiliates do this and set the cookie for a certain time.
    So if you go from one affiliate id page and load a different id,
    the first one gets credit. Some don't and set a new value each
    time.

    The point is moot as far as backlink juice.

    Google does not have a love affair with affiliates anyway.

    Paul
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    • Profile picture of the author markowe
      Originally Posted by paulgl View Post

      They won't get watered down. Everything after the "?" is a non
      issue. You could type in warriorforum.com/?whateveryouwant
      and it will load in warriorforum.com

      The ?= is for php/mysql or some database reference.

      The link will look like it goes to the domain.com anyway.

      If you don't like the end page having a ?= attached to it,
      then you need to set a cookie, database value, etc.,
      with the id and forward it to the "regular" dot com.

      Some affiliates do this and set the cookie for a certain time.
      So if you go from one affiliate id page and load a different id,
      the first one gets credit. Some don't and set a new value each
      time.

      The point is moot as far as backlink juice.

      Google does not have a love affair with affiliates anyway.

      Paul
      Aha, thanks for your input. I was vaguely under the impression that there might be an issue with non-canonical links, or if you like, "duplicate content", since all the different URL variants (with the parameter) yield the same page. I also imagine Google is on-the-ball enough to recognise that it is the same page, but I thought maybe redirecting them all to the same page might focus things a bit. Actually, I seem to remember a Clickbank product-owner bemoaning this - that he got outranked by all his affiliates - blaming it on this precise issue. Of course, he could just have been wrong!
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      • Profile picture of the author vendor
        Fellow Warriors
        How wrong you are!
        G does index the affiliate trail and it devestates the keyword rankings
        for a website.
        Im speaking from experience.
        Here is an example:
        google this vendor
        www . fullmovies . com
        (sorry about the spaces, can't post links yet).
        You will see their page is indexed with an affiliate tail
        and YES IT HURTS THE KEYWORD RANKINGS (from personal experience).

        I just posted about this in another thread and someone suggested
        using cannonical url tag on the homepage which i am currently checking.

        But this issue is a disaster as far as SEO for clickbank vendors go.
        i have multiple examples of this both on my vendor sites and others vendors at clickbank.
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  • Profile picture of the author markowe
    Thanks for this, yeah, I didn't think those responding to my post really understood the issue properly so I just gave up on my question, but I was just thinking about that again today.

    Definitely I think using the canonical URL tag would help, and possibly permanently redirecting any page with an affiliate tag to the canonical page ought to solve that problem, and hugely improve things from a SEO point of view. It might hack off affiliates who are trying to rank for your product keywords themselves, but I think they can live with it... Anyone see a flaw with that? My major concern is that cookies don't get lost or anything like that, but since they are inserted during the "hop" it shouldn't be a problem, right?
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    Who says you can't earn money as an eBay affiliate any more? My stats say otherwise

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  • Profile picture of the author vendor
    After watching the google video i think canonical
    URL only speak to the spider and will not hurt any affiliate cookie/website relashionship.
    Like i said, i only implemented this today so i would need to wait a while to see if it resolves anything.
    others suggested using a 301 redirect but here im kind of lost. where would
    i put this redirect? my best guess would be to set the clickbank hop to point
    to the redirect which in turn will point to the homepage but im afraid to damage
    the cookie planting process.
    Im not big in SEO and trying to learn as i go along any expert advise from anyone would be highly appericiated.
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  • Profile picture of the author markowe
    I believe that the 301 redirect would work like this, but you would have to look around for an exact implementation:

    You need to set up a command in .htaccess something like:

    Redirect http://www.mysite.com/mysalespage[*wildcards*] http://www.mysite.com/salespage [301]

    That is NOT a valid command - what I mean by this is simply that you need a redirect that will identify any incoming traffic to your sales page that has something after the URL that you don't want, like ?affid=blabla and redirects all those to the canonical address.

    I really hate .htaccess and regular expression stuff, so can't help more than that for now, but someone will help you on a coding forum (not here, a dedicated programming forum) - that's the basic principle.
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    • Profile picture of the author cnite3174
      I think if you really want to benefit from SEO you must create unique pages outside of clickbank for your affiliates to give them a great chance of ranking. But what you can do is offer unique short pages made resembling the same look of the long page that link from the short to long page by the their hoplinks.

      Then you can put a text anchored keyword or keywords at the bottom of their unique short page linking back to your site giving you SEO benefit. You will be happy along with your affiliates as well.

      I'm saying all of this because I do this, not as the owner of the product but the affiliate. Having great keyword folder structure is what Google loves with unique content that I control, whatever percentage I like, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60% whatever from page to page all with anchor texts linking back to me.

      But for you, you can upload their page into a html editor and create link back to the long by their hoplink and upload it to their host on their domain, interm giving you a link back to your site.

      Or create a authority site of 1000 pages resembling your exact site site on 1 different host and domain or 10 host and domains equalling to 10,000 pages with all the links poiting back to you.


      I hope this helps,
      Carlos Knight
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