101 Articles Affiliate Only Sites
AFFILIATE ONLY SITES
Affiliate websites are the biggest menace the search engines have to face. Both users and search engines like relevant quality and unique content. Search engine users want to click the link and end up on websites that offer quality information and quality products / services at good price. An affiliate is just redirecting the users to buy a product where he earns a commission for all the sales he does for the linked website.
Affiliate sites are rarely useful as most people like to buy products directly from a merchant than going through an intermediate website. Intermediate website acts as a referral to the actual merchant website. This not only gives trouble for the users but also in some cases they pay a higher cost than what they pay on the merchant website. Affiliate websites resort to spam more often than ordinary websites.
Most of the affiliate websites you see are just thrown away websites, meant to only redirect traffic. If that site is devalued in Google or other search engine ranking, the affiliate starts numbering the new websites. This is their job, to start 100s of spam websites and become affiliates of 100s of merchants.
I have come across legitimate affiliate websites which offer quality services and exceptional quality information to users. These types of sites are rare. In some instances, an affiliate cannot be named an affiliate because his Business model works in a different way. Some websites depend on affiliates and resellers to sell their products. I have never seen any corporate website list their products but they have links to their affiliates who sell their products. It makes easier for consumers, to buy from the affiliates because they are much nearer to their location and can be communicated better than the parent company.
Search engines don't always frown upon affiliate websites. They want best user experience and if an affiliate sticks to the search engine guidelines and provides unique quality information for the search engine users, search engines will have no trouble in indexing and ranking them.
Affiliates should stop their dependency on search engines to redirect traffic and improve the overall quality of the website which make them look natural.
Link cloaking:
Link cloaking is a practice followed by spammers in order to mislead the search engines and users. Link cloaking is a process where an affiliate link is added in such a way that the link doesn't look like an affiliate link. these links use 302 redirect which causes problems for the search engines.An example can be,
http://www.affiliateaffiliatelink.com/recommends/fgfgjfhgj.htmlas opposed to
http://randompop.clickbank.net/?tid=shofjhgj1238Link cloaking is not a manipulation tactic but is done to mis guide the search engine and web users.
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Screen Shots depicting advertisements given for Affiliate sites |
This site allows other websites to select any 20 topics which will be affiliated to their website. Consequently, that website will become AFFILIATE ONLY SITE!
In the image below there is a difference shown between spam and non spam links. Spammers can make money in two ways: Pay-Per-Click and Thin Affiliates.There are other spam pages whose focus is on causing harm to user's computers with sneaky downloads rather than money making.
Guidelines given by Google for affiliate only sites
Google has banned the sites for lifetime who do not have a control over their web properties and which results in non-improvement of "landing page quality" on 3rd party sites. Google has also stated it's Reconsideration Request Form wherein the sites have to provide more evidence of good faith before a site be reconsidered.
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Working Example |
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References |
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Other sites that refer to the same manipulation tactic are as follows |