with_hindsight
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 101
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Posted: 2003-Oct-24 20:48
Can u achieve inbound link PR with affiliate codes?
So for example is a link such as "www.site.com?affiliate_code=1"
the same in terms of achieving PR as
"www.site.com"
Thanks people. 
The reason why I ask is I'm soon to start my own affiliate program but I also want to be sure that my site has high PR and does well in free listings. If affilliate coded inbound links are worth less in terms of PR does anyone know a good solution for me?
many thanks.
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bhartzer
Staff
Joined: Jun 08, 2000
# Posts: 7042
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Posted: 2003-Oct-24 20:53
No, you cannot achieve any PageRank benefit from affiliate codes. www.site.com?affiliate_code=1 is usually treated as a different page than www.site.com.
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Logan
Joined: Aug 14, 2002
# Posts: 3749
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Posted: 2003-Oct-27 13:37
The reason why I ask is I'm soon to start my own affiliate program but I also want to be sure that my site has high PR and does well in free listings. If affilliate coded inbound links are worth less in terms of PR does anyone know a good solution for me?
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I've often wondered about this, and it seems to me that as bhartzer said there is not 'good' standard solution to 'track an affiliate - and provide the related PR available from that link. It's tough, as many who often rely on affiliate programs cannot benefit from the link. Perhaps that is the way google likes it. but it seems some 'technical' issues might be involved as well.
with_hindsight, it would be great if you could come up with a solution. After thinking it through previously, here is my two cents. Why not use a typical url (dynamically referenced). Instead of use myaffiliateid=123, make a url reference to www.widgetxsite.com/123.html. Program an affiliate page so that it references the url page name 123.html and associates it to that particular affiliate, etc.
Each affiliate page should be made to provide 'unique' content in comparison to others when the search engines index them. i.e. more unique pages for your site. additionally, i think each 123.html affiliate page should be part of your sites natural internal link structure ... so they are never orphaned pages.
In this scenario you can reference an affiliate, add content, and provide the related pr benefits. of course nothing like this is 'available' and you'd need to create it yourself. But it definitely can be done, imo.
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SEOK
Joined: Jul 24, 2002
# Posts: 288
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Posted: 2003-Oct-27 15:48
In this scenario you can reference an affiliate, add content, and provide the related pr benefits. of course nothing like this is 'available' and you'd need to create it yourself. But it definitely can be done, imo.
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This is a bad idea and opens your site up to affiliate hi-jacking. Many affiates online are much better at SEO than the site owners and can easily hi-jack your entire site so that they make every sale for you online. You are much better off capturing a few extra sales from an affiliate and continuing to work on your own sites popularity. You have the advantage when it comes to popularity as you actually provide products. I never link to an affiliate only site.
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runboy27
Joined: Jan 02, 2002
# Posts: 154
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Posted: 2003-Oct-27 16:12
Yes, you would still keep the PR, but you would still have problems channeling the place where you really want it.
One option to achieve what you want is to analyze your logfiles and use this information to keep track of referrals. A lot of the Logfile analysers allows you to write filters for them. One way to do this is by applying the following filters:
- Remove all spider traffic
- Remove traffic that is not towards the page/pages you are directing traffic to.
- Remove traffic that doesn't have your affiliates as the refering domain.
Now you have something to work with. The remaining data you can sort after affilates. Display hourly/daily/weekly hits etc. Only show unique traffic (session or IP based). Easily spot cheating attempts etc. etc.
In a good Logfile Analyzer this proces can be fully automated so you don't have to touch anything and you can even let it spit out HTML pages set up like you want them for your affiliates to see.
Another option, probably better option, is to use Data Transformation Service in MS SQL 2000 Database. If you write the filters yourself for that one you can automatically make it throw the data in the database afterwards. That eases the process of integrating your affiliate system with your payment system.
On top of this I recommend writting some sort of spider that tests all the referers (Again automatically picked from the log files) links to make sure they have not been tampered with. It is so easy to put links/affiliate codes into clickable pictures etc.
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runboy27
Joined: Jan 02, 2002
# Posts: 154
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Posted: 2003-Oct-27 16:20
SEOK - I don't see why you think his method opens up for affiliate hi-jacking. Can you please elaborate on this?
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Logan
Joined: Aug 14, 2002
# Posts: 3749
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Posted: 2003-Oct-27 16:35
ummm - i do. In my scenario, a competitive affiliate could easily solicit all of your affiliates because they are readily visible on your domain.
The pagerank can be 'channelled' to urls as appropriate, but seok's comments are very valid. A server side solution is an interesting approach. How accurate can you make it?
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runboy27
Joined: Jan 02, 2002
# Posts: 154
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Posted: 2003-Oct-27 17:16
"ummm - i do. In my scenario, a competitive affiliate could easily solicit all of your affiliates because they are readily visible on your domain"
I am not sure I understand. When I think about affiliate hi-jacking I am thinking of automatic replacement of affiliate code within the browser is that what you are concerned about? It seems unlikely unless we are talking about really big affiliate programs like Amazons, CJs etc.
"A server side solution is an interesting approach. How accurate can you make it?"
Close to 100% of course there is always the problem with defining a unique user, but that problem is also present in all other affiliate programs. You can use cookie or IP tracking or a combo of the two. I personally would use IP alone in an affiliate program since it is way to easy to cheat with cookies. Yes, IP address it not 100% accurate. But I would say that for an affiliate program it is pretty close to accurate. A lot more accurate than if you used it as a counter for general stats.
You can also track unique users by analyzing their path on your site by comparing page/ip/referrer but that is a little more tricky, but we do it on one of our pages where we provide advanced statistics for all of our membersites (Hitlist)
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Pongo
Joined: May 27, 2002
# Posts: 665
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Posted: 2003-Oct-27 17:38
As an affiliate and an SEO I would put any links in java or whatever it took so the merchant would not gain any pr from my sites - I do this anyway for other reasons. My
merchants are my competitors too after all.
I know not all affiliates understand why they should do this or even how but I think a great many may hijack any attempt at leaching PR from their sites.
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with_hindsight
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 101
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Posted: 2003-Oct-27 17:51
Great replies so far, very interesting and i welcome the feedback.
One alternative i see is that assuming my product is a high converter I could implement a spider system that valiates only affiliate coded banners that are placed within a page that additionally contains a term such as "this site works in collaboration with www.site.com". Thus I would not recieve PR directly from my affiliate banners but from text links where all affiliate banners are situated.
Is there a script already available for this?
again, thanks everyone.
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runboy27
Joined: Jan 02, 2002
# Posts: 154
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Posted: 2003-Oct-27 17:56
Pongo - We would never allow any of our affiliates to do what you are suggesting. It is simply to easy to cheat that way.
with_hindsight - Not many affiliates would agree to this since a lot of people would probably press the test link instead of the banner.
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loudNRG
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 32
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Posted: 2003-Oct-27 20:44
Would an IP re-direct not work for this? The affiliate would simply link to the correct page such as www.mywebsite.com/product.html and the IP for the refering affiliate site would be pre-logged into a program that would then serve up the correct page for the particular affiliate. This way the affiliate gets the credit for the referal and the refered site would get the PR benefits.
I know that IP redirection technology is a grey area for SE's but if it could be done so that it was invisible to the SE's (big if...) then I see this being a bona fide use for this technology and shouldn't get you black listed.
In theory it seems that it could work...
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Pongo
Joined: May 27, 2002
# Posts: 665
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Posted: 2003-Oct-27 21:10
How can putting code into a .js be used to cheat? who could get cheated, the merchant? How?
I would really like a good clear answer to this.
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Bry
Joined: Sep 30, 2003
# Posts: 207
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Posted: 2003-Oct-27 21:40
Affiliate programs usually work on 1 of 2 methods:
1 - Paying for clicks
2 - Paying for conversions
There's no way to cheat with #2. #1 requires a lot of safeguards as one could theoretically 'cheat' with any method of linking being it banner, flash, java, javascript, whatever.
So if you don't want people cheating. Base your program on conversions.
- Bry
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runboy27
Joined: Jan 02, 2002
# Posts: 154
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Posted: 2003-Oct-27 21:54
Pongo - It greatly depends on the way the affiliate program is set up and wether it is a pay-for-performance or pay-for-traffic program.
The program type we have discussed here, where the link on the affiliate site is static, combined with a pay-for-traffic program would be vulnerable if you are not able to spider the code with frequent intervals. Putting the code in a js. file makes it a lot harder to control that the code on the affiliated site has not been tampered with (changed link test, picture etc.)
Realize this is only a problem when we are talking pay per click type programs.
In that kind of programs it is best if the affiliate code itself is added from a .js file (Pulled from the afiliate programs server), so every loaded link is given a unique identifier and is virtually tamper free. This is also the way Googles Adsense program works.
CJs code for example would never be safe in a CPC environment. Way too easy to play with.
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Pongo
Joined: May 27, 2002
# Posts: 665
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Posted: 2003-Oct-27 22:19
Thanks for the insight guys, I had forgotten all about (pay per click)as I am only involved with % of sale... I know there is a lot of cheating going on and it hurts all of us, I will however keep my pr at any (practical) cost and I think several others will as well.
So who cares about a few affiliates? Well its going to be the hard ball affiliates (big $$$) that will run from (pr leaching) look at all of the merchants who would KILL to have the great affiliates writing sites for them - then look at how many big money affiliates there are in comparison (not many). Good merchants are everywhere, good affiliate marketers are not.
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runboy27
Joined: Jan 02, 2002
# Posts: 154
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Posted: 2003-Oct-27 22:55
"I am only involved with % of sale..."
Are you saying you haven't tried out Googles Adsense program? It is one of my better moneymakers. In my case beats CJ by a mile.
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Pongo
Joined: May 27, 2002
# Posts: 665
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Posted: 2003-Oct-28 00:20
I don't have any sites that would qualify for it right now - and I don't think Ill build one for it. I know some people are doing really well with it but I'm going to stick to what I'm doing for now anyway.
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with_hindsight
Joined: Eons Ago
# Posts: 101
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Posted: 2003-Oct-29 18:23
I like the idea of using an IP redirect and will look into the security of this.. many thanks for the feedback people. do we have any 'heads' opinions on this one?
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runboy27
Joined: Jan 02, 2002
# Posts: 154
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Posted: 2003-Oct-29 18:56
with_hindsight & loudNRG
The IP address passed is not the IP of the affiliated site, but the IP address of the visitor, so that method wouldn't work.
You could use the referer and redirect depending on that one. That is pretty much what I am suggesting above, just with log files.
I personally would stick to the logfile method and not play around with redirecting people. I am pretty sure the Google bot will see that there is a redirect and that will cause trouble.
Yes, you could make special rules for Google bot IPs, but Google will figure this out sooner or later.
Google sometimes spiders pages from a new IP address without any identification that this is the Google bot. This is done for the sole purpose of finding doorway pages. It will compare normal Google bot index with the one not giving any information about being a Google bot and if there is a difference it is a doorway page and it will be penalized.
And yes, the last bit is pure speculation, but I would be very surprised if it is not the case.
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