44 replies to this topic

[Jodi]

Guys, I'm really stumped on this one and I'm hoping to get some different perspectives on things to know how to handle it from here.

For the past several months, I've been working with a client that sells Oriental and Persian rugs over the web. They were *nowhere* when I started with them. Certainly, their main keywords of "discount persian rugs" and "persian rugs" didn't display any of their properties in the first fifty results. After working with them, improving their titles, descriptions, helping them to rewrite some of their text so that it utilized their main keywords a bit more, advising them on usability of their site (they had a huge bit of .NET garbage at the top and when they got rid of it, their listings skyrocketted!), they had just recently achieved a #8 placement in Google for the keyword phrase of "persian rugs" and were even better placed for "discount persian rugs". That was the end of last week.

THIS week, I looked and found this:
http://www.google.co...&q=persian rugs

While they are currently paying for Google AdWords and are therefore showing up in that capacity (at the top of the page - Rugman.com. They have three affiliates on the side though!), their own index page has dropped off the map suddenly.

Looking at that, I also see two results (#7 and #9) that are linking to them via an affiliate link. So my assumption was that Google's algo might have had a problem with how their affiliates were conducting themselves - and since they are using Commission Junction for their affiliate network, those quickserve links automatically redirect to their index page.

When I queried Google about this, this was the response I got (and admittedly, they were quick to answer, and about as helpful as they could have been):

We were able to find a listing for your index
page. You can view this listing at:
http://www.google.co...G=Google Search

You will see that this listing is actually for a page that redirects to
your main page. This has likely occurred because that page has been ranked
as more relevant for the query in question by our automated PageRank
algorithm. PageRank takes into account not only the content on the page in
question, but also the quality and anchor text of the links that point to
that page.

So their results have dropped off the map because their affiliate link seems to have more "relevance" than their main site?? Huh?

I have been doing SEO for a LONG time and this is the first time I've ever come across anything like this (maybe I'm not working with clients in the right industry for it, huh? ). Do any of you have any advice? Is there anything that can be done about this?

Your suggestions would be greatly appreciated. We worked very hard over several months and were just starting to see awesome results. I'd hate for them to just disappear.

Thanks!

All the best,

--Jodi

[Jill]

Hey Jodi, I've seen this happen affiliate links before. It generally doesn't last long. It seems more like a problem with Google figuring out how to deal with the various URLs that all make up the same page.

I would guess that the affiliate link will only show up for your client's site for a few weeks or so, and then revert back to the actual link. That seems to be the typical thing that I've experienced, at least. It's great when it's your affiliate link pointing to someone else's site, but it kinda sucks when it's someone else's affiliate link pointing to your site!

Jill

[Jodi]

Hi Jill. So you're saying this should correct itself in a couple of weeks? I guess if they're still making money from their affiliate links, it's not something that's going to grind their business to a halt or anything, but it seems such a crying shame. We've worked SO hard on their site. It's utterly awesome, if I do say so myself. Full of useful content, though there's so much of it that I'm still going through some of it to get it working as well as it possibly can. And they're constantly introducing new "wizards" and such to their site to make the rug buying process as fun and painless as possible for their visitors.

We were seeing such great results until just this week.

I did advise the client that I thought this would be temporary as it just doesn't make *sense* - especially coming from Google. And I pointed out to *Google* that I thought there was a search quality problem there. Not that I expected a human editor to go in and change things (even if they *could*) on my account or anything, but that I thought it was a problem for their visitors since the quality of the search wasn't as good as it could have been.

Anyway, thanks for your response! It's at least a little comforting.

All the best,

--Jodi

[Jill]

I'm saying it most likely will correct itself. You'll just have to wait and see, I guess. The only way to prevent it is to not have affiliates, but I imagine the benefits outweigh the risks with that.

Jill

[Jodi]

This is true. I mean, if THEY are nowhere on that page, at least their affiliates are all over it.

Not the best situation, I admit, but as you say, hopefully it'll sort itself out very soon. From a search perspective, I'm not sure that the current algo is working up to Google's usual par. But time will tell.

--Jodi

[glengara]

What's a bit odd is your index page should have fallen so drastically, I take it there's no danger of duplicate content on an affiliate site?

[MakeMeTop]

What's really interesting is that Google doesn't seem to object to the redirect. I assume as it is not "deceptive".

In fact, it seems to think the re-direct page has greater "merit" than the actual home page. Hmmm

[Jodi]

There is no duplication, no. The affiliates aren't copying info. In fact, if you do a search for "persian rugs" and then have a look at the #7 and #9 listing, you'll see that they've actually created their own "resources" within which to sell the rugs - which happen to be affiliate links. I would suppose that this is the *right* way for an affiliate to go about things.

But as was mentioned, since *when* is an affiliate redirect given more merit than the index page ?? That makes NO sense to me.

Rugman really does have an awesome site and after all the hard work we've put into it, it would really be a shame (and shameful of Google, frankly) to have it disappear like that.

I'm hoping that Jill has the right of it and the problem will "correct" itself over the next few weeks.

I guess time will tell. But if anyone else has any insights, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks!

--Jodi

[Scottie]

Jodi-

You say the affiliate sites have built up unique content and are doing things well- are they just optimized better? More inbound links from "important" pages?

Google doesn't understand the business relationships between sites in order to favor the "main" site over an affiliate site. It sounds to me like there might be more to it... there's typically a logical explanation.

[Jodi]

Hi Scottie. Actually, I think there IS quite a logical explanation. The Rugman.com site is a shopping site and is therefore very "script" driven. When I check Google to see how many pages are indexed, I see that only TWO of them are - and one of them leads to an error. :-/ This makes me think that the crawler is having a problem with their site. But what's weird about this, is that they *were* doing so well only a short time ago and their pages were being crawled *then*.

So recently, either Google suddenly stopped being able to crawl their site due to an algo change, or Rugman.com changed something in how their site is put together that prevents the spider from crawling them properly.

I had a look at it using the Lynx viewer that Jill referred to in her last newsletter and I got this error:

Start file could not be found or is not text/html or text/plain
        Exiting...

I'm not sure why it would do that. Do any of you have thoughts? Is it a scripting issue? Are they forcing session IDs or cookies? Is there something inherent in the construction of their site that is preventing crawling? That just seems very odd.

And it *wasn't* like this only a short time ago.

Any suggestions you can make would be greatly appreciated.

I'm going to get them into Lycos and Inktomi's paid inclusion and see if that helps, but if there's a problem with the site being crawled, I'd really like to fix that problem. :/

Thanks!

--Jodi

[Steve Gill]

I took a quick look and noticed one of those affiliates (has 'discount' and 'area' in it's domain name) has a lot more backlinks than your site does and has a PR of 6 while your PR is 0.

If you go to the index page of their site (not the .shtml page), you'll see that one has a PR of 7. Looking at some of its backlinks, you'll see that webmeister has a LOT of sites promoting various affiliate programs, and at the bottom of each page (that I looked at) he has links to his OTHER sites with a keyword as link text.

Check out the backlinks for that index page above (!) - google goes on for *47* pages (~470 backlinks?)!

Their "company" seems to be called 'gigastores' (a cursory guess) and obviously has a lot of affiliate sites online that're all sharing PR among themselves.

If you have a PR of 0 and they have a PR of 6, and are likewise well optimized, that explains why they're ranked higher.

It's also interesting to note that their site has got to have a 50% keyword ratio for the term 'rugs', which (sadly) supports what I keep seeing... which is that keyword stuffing DOES work. I've seen plenty of sites with outrageous keyword ratios outranking other otherwise better optimized sites...

But either way... just be thankful that other website is on YOUR side and not working for the competition.

Hope that helps,

- Steve Gill

[qwerty]

Are they forcing session IDs or cookies?

They're definitely not forcing cookies. When I went to the home page it tried to give me one and I refused it. The page loaded fine and I was able to browse the site without another attempt to give me a cookie.

[Jodi]

Hi Steve. I appreciate your having a look.

So basically what you're saying is that unless I decide to stop playing by the "rules", I can't help my client??

Geez...

Is THAT the state of the search engines these days??

Any advice here?

--Jodi

[Jodi]

Thanks for checking, Qwerty. This is REALLY frustrating.

--Jodi

[Jodi]

Ok. I REFUSE to give up here.

I think I know how they might get some benefit here from the efforts of their affiliates. Right now, they're using Commission Junction for those affiliate links - which means those quickserve urls are getting the "credit" rather than rugman.com itself.

If they were to run the affiliate program through their own site, the address the affiliates would need to link to would actually be a rugman.com url, plus they wouldn't have to pay Commission Junction fees.

Any of you out there have any suggestions for affiliate program software that a company can run itself?

I'd love to hear your suggestions.

Thanks!

All the best,

--Jodi