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
-
Canonical tag on a large site
when would you reccomend using a canonical tag on a large site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cristiana.Solinas0 -
Ajax tabs on site
Hello, On a webpage I have multiple tabs, each with their own specific content. Now these AJAX/JS tabs, if Google only finds the first tab when the page loads the content would be too thin. What do you suggest as an implementation? With Google being able to crawl and render more JS nowadays, but they deprecated AJAX crawling a while back. I was maybe thinking of doing a following implementation where when JS is disabled, the tabs collapse under each other with the content showing. With JS enabled then they render as tabs. This is usually quite a common implementation for tabbed content plugins on Wordpress as well. Also, Google had commented about that hidden/expandable content would count much less, even with the above JS fix. Look forward to your thoughts on this. Thanks, Conrad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conalt1 -
Working around Dev Site
I am working around development site. All pages are 'nofollow'. What can I advice on, when it come to SEO and is there any good article or checklist that I can go through. One thing I wanted to know is how can I check for broken links or meta data or any other SEO analytics if the page is 'nofollow' and I cannot crawl it with screaming frog or any other tools.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | atlanticocean0 -
On 1 of our sites we have our Company name in the H1 on our other site we have the page title in our H1 - does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1, H2 and Page Tile
We have 2 sites that have been set up slightly differently. On 1 site we have the Company name in the H1 and the product name in the page title and H2. On the other site we have the Product name in the H1 and no H2. Does anyone have any advise about the best information to have in the H1 and H2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Why are these sites outranking me?
I am trying to rank for the phrase "a link between worlds walkthrough" I am on page 1 but there are several results that just outranks me and I cannot see any reason that they would be doing so. My site is hiddentriforce.com/a-link-between-worlds/walkthrough/ For that page I have 5 linking domains, varied anchor text that spans from things like "here" to a variety of related phrases. All of the links come from really good sites My page has 1400 likes, 90 shares, and about 20 each in tweets and +'s DA of 44 PA of 37 The 4 and 5 ranked sites both have WAY less social interactions, lower PA and DA, less links, etc Yet they outrank me why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
How best to structure wordpress site.
I need help on how to structure my wordpress site to avoid duplicate content issues. Basically I have a main category page for each of my targeted keywords (about 12). From each of those though I want to create a category for each county in the uk and then about 15 towns within each county. This means I'm creating a LOT of categories. Eg: /plumbers/lincolnshire/lincoln x 15 other counties and towns /local-plumbers/cambridgeshire/cambridge x 15 other counties and towns (I have about 12 main keywords I'm going after) I'm basically creating a category for every town in the UK going after long tail keywords. What is the best way to manage this in wordpress? Advice from another question I posted on here is to write a unique category description for each one as the posts in each category are almost identical. The other problem here is I'm ending up with hundreds of links on a page. (They can't all be seen by the user as I'm using a drop down menu plugin). Any advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
How to remove an entire site from Google?
Hi people, I have a site with around 2.000 urls indexed in google, and 10 subdomains indexed too, which I want to remove entirely, to set up a new web. Which is the best way to do it? Regards!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoExpertos0 -
URL Structure for Directory Site
We have a directory that we're building and we're not sure if we should try to make each page an extension of the root domain or utilize sub-directories as users narrow down their selection. What is the best practice here for maximizing your SERP authority? Choice #1 - Hyphenated Architecture (no sub-folders): State Page /state/ City Page /city-state/ Business Page /business-city-state/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knowyourbank
4) Location Page /locationname-city-state/ or.... Choice #2 - Using sub-folders on drill down: State Page /state/ City Page /state/city Business Page /state/city/business/
4) Location Page /locationname-city-state/ Again, just to clarify, I need help in determining what the best methodology is for achieving the greatest SEO benefits. Just by looking it would seem that choice #1 would work better because the URL's are very clear and SEF. But, at the same time it may be less intuitive for search. I'm not sure. What do you think?0