Dealing with Spammy Affiliate Site Copies
-
We have a longstanding site that sells media files with a large number of digital products.
We offer a referral program with rewards for those that tell others about us.
In the last year, we have seen some sites popping up primarily in China that appear to be spammy looking advertisement based copies of our own site with product pages that link back to our actual products using a referral link/code. (no-follow links.)
These sites started popping out more when we noticed that some of their pages were outranking our own actual product pages.
Any thoughts on this? Our affiliate policy states that the affiliate program is meant to help and not harm our site. In one sense this is traffic to our site which is supposed to be a good thing, but if these pages are ranking above our own, that is not what we are wanting. I would bet these pages might get clicked on and due to the spammy nature of these sites, the user bounces and never actually gets to our website.
How would you handle something like this?
Thanks!!
Craig
-
I would do both #1 and #2. If you can contact them and ask them to take the content and links down I would do that as well, documenting the request for future use in the DMCA complaint or in a disavow link request in GWT - if needed.
-
Yes, our affiliate system does allow for this if we want it to. We could pre-review for future affiliates, but the damage is already done in these current cases. We are talking 2-3 websites here that have probably thousands of pages of our products.
One of the sites is even using the .org version of our domain, but that one actually advertises our competitors products.... uh... yeah.... Not sure how we will deal with this trademark violation with a Chinese website yet, or if there is anything we can do, but it is a pretty serious issue.
The options I see are:
1. Based on our sign-up terms, we could suspend these affiliate accounts because they violate the terms by providing more harm than good.
2. These sites do list DMCA notices, so we could actually contact them under the DMCA and tell them to remove our content.
3. Do nothing, but try to get our pages to rank higher than these pages and consider it just another link to our site.
Thanks for the responses!
Craig
-
^ This. Ever look into an affiliate tracking program like Has Offers?
-
Do you have an affiliate application process in place such that you can accept or reject applications?
Best,
Christopher
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Consolidate Local sites to one larger site
I am a partner in a real estate company that operates in 10 different markets across the country. Each of these markets has it's own individual domain. My question is should we consolidate each of these markets into one domain that services all markets? What would we possibly gain or lose from an organic traffic standpoint? In some of our more established markets (Indianapolis, Las Vegas, Tampa, Orlando and Charlotte) our organic traffic accounts for 50-60% of our total traffic. In some of our newer markets (Denver, Phoenix, San Diego) it accounts for less than 15%. We do operate under two different brand names. EasyStreet Realty and Highgarden Real Estate. EasyStreet has been around since 2000 with most of our Highgarden sites only up for 6-24 months. Another question is we are considering converting all EasyStreet divisions to Highgarden. I am a little reluctant to do so, since most of our organic traffic is coming from our EasyStreet sites. Thoughts? You can find links to all our sites at www.easystreetrealty.com or www.highgarden.com Thank you in advance for your insight.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EasyStreet0 -
Disavowing Links for Subcategory of Site
Has anyone tried using Google's Disavow tool with only a specific subcategory of their site? We're an ecommerce company and our site took a small hit with this recent Penguin update. We're certain previous linkbuilding efforts are the cause. But we'd like to try the Disavow tool with 1 subcategory to start, see if our rankings for that category improve (we used to be top 3, now ~12 or 13), and if so then roll it out through the rest of the site. Looking for input from others on if they have any experience with this or if it'd be better to just go for the whole thing at once. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingof50 -
Mobile Site Outranking Main Site
Hi, We have recently been hit with a problem regarding our mobile site, where it is outranking our main site. This is causing a drop in orders and ranknings for our main site. It would appear that google has indexed our mobile site and so the two are now competing against each other. Our main site is on a .co.uk and our mobile site on a .mobi, but we have now taken down the mobile site until we get this sorted. Does anyone else have any experience of this happening and how to stop it happening again? Thanks Steve
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Steve251 -
Development site crawled
We just found out our password protected development site has been crawled. We are worried about duplicate content - what are the best steps to take to correct this beyond adding to robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
Problems with a NoIndex NoFollow Site
For legal reasons my website is going to launch non-branded websites. We do not have the capacity to make these site sufficiently unique from the main site so we are planning on having them be NoIndex NoFollow. Are there any potential SEO problems here? What will the implication be if in ~1-2 years from launching the NoIndex NoFollow we make the site unique, take away the tag and want to start promoting these sites organically. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
A Site in Flash to Optimize
Hello, I have to understand if this site www.spacemilanmodels.com.pt can be optimize since the entire website is in flash wich is not good for optimizacion. What do you guys suggest? Recommendations? Is it possible only with link-building? Tks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0 -
Site: on Google
Hello, people. I have a quick question regarding search in Google. I use search operator [site:url] to see indexing stauts of my site. Today, I was checking indexing status and I found that Google shows different numbers of indexed pages depends on search setting. 1. At default setting (set as 10 search result shows) > I get about 150 pages indexed by Google. 2. I set 100 results shows per page and tried again. > I get about 52 pages indexed by Google. Of course I used same page URL. I really want to know which data is accurate. Please help people!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Artience0 -
Press Release Sites
Ok, I am getting a lot of conflicting information about press release sites. i have been doing press release's for a while (mostly manually), I have also tried a few companies that claim to do it well (never do). After the Panda update the PR sites I have been using are just not as effective. Does anyone else have this problem or are there better PR sites that can be recommended.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomBarker820