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
-
Ranking Issue for New Site
Hi all, I have got a specific SEO challenge. 6 months ago, we started to build an eCommerce site (located in the UK). In order to speed up the site launch, we copied the entire site over from an existing site based in Ireland. Now, the new UK site has been running for 5 months. Google has indexed many pages, which is good, but we can't rank high (position: between 20-30 for most pages). We thought it was because of content duplication in spite of different regions. So we tried to optimize the pages for the UK site to make them more UK-related and avoid content duplication. I've also used schema to tell google it's a UK-based site and set up Google my business and got more local citations. Besides, If you could give me any suggestions, it'd be perfect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Insightful_Media
Thank you so much for your time and advice.1 -
Site Structure: How do I deal with a great user experience that's not the best for Google's spiders?
We have ~3,000 photos that have all been tagged. We have a wonderful AJAXy interface for users where they can toggle all of these tags to find the exact set of photos they're looking for very quickly. We've also optimized a site structure for Google's benefit that gives each category a page. Each category page links to applicable album pages. Each album page links to individual photo pages. All pages have a good chunk of unique text. Now, for Google, the domain.com/photos index page should be a directory of sorts that links to each category page. Alternatively, the user would probably prefer the AJAXy interface. What is the best way to execute this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tatermarketing0 -
SEO Priorities for Ecommerce Sites
Hello All! What is the best way to rank SEO tasks by PRIORITY for Ecommerce sites to improve?? It can be quite overwhelming with all the types of projects/tasks needed to improve organic rankings... How would you rank the most CRITICAL tasks to spend the MOST TIME on to the tasks you spend less on. Appreciate your input in advance 🙂 Thank you! Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wickerparadise0 -
301s from previous site
Hi! Got quite a tricky problem regarding a client, http://www.muchbetteradventures.com/ and their previous site, http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/ Here's the background: We have approx 1500 'listing' pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/listing/view/1925/the-barre-des-ecrins-or-the-dome-des-ecrins-mountaineering-trip They bring in min 2k hits/month, and also add to the overall site authority I suspect. They will eventually all have a home on main domain. When they do, they will also each have been rewritten to be unique, so the value of them will increase (many are currently not). We also have landing pages like this: http://v1.muchbetteradventures.com/view/559/volunteering-holidays- which despite being hideous are ranked fairly well (page 1 for key terms). We cannot currently fulfil all these on main domain, but do not want to shut them down and lose positioning. Choices as I see it: Make a landing page e.g. muchbetteradventures.com/volunteering and a) redirect from old landing page, b) redirect all related 'listings' to this page. May help preserve rankings of main landing page (the most important), but not of any listings? Import all listings to have a home on main domain, (probably as children of a landing page, but not rewritten to be unique just yet). Make them not accessible from homepage, and change functionality of them so that new visitors from google are told we cannot currently help them with this trip. This is more work to complete so will take longer to do and is a distraction from our core focus so needs good justification! Stay running largely as we are, slowly redirecting 1 page at a time as we carry over more and more options to main domain. This will take over 12 months min.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
Noindex Mobile Site?
So I wanted to get everyone's opinion. Have a client in online retail on ASP and their developers built a mobile site a while back before we took the client on. For the sake of this post, just assume, resources are limited anddevelopers are not good (constantly break things we request to get fixed). They never installed analytics on the mobile site, so all I have to go off of is referral data on the main stores GA account for m.example.com However if I look to see what is indexed by doing site:m.example.com am not seeing many pages. The mobile site has a ton of internal links in GWT and am questioning its negative impact as there are no canonicals, no mobile sitemap present. In the ideal world, I would implement proper Mobile SEO practices but given the resources of no dev budget and devs not being good, I was thinking about noindexing the mobile site since I can RDP into the site and access robots. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Sean_Dawes0 -
Our Site's Content on a Third Party Site--Best Practices?
One of our clients wants to use about 200 of our articles on their site, and they're hoping to get some SEO benefit from using this content. I know standard best practices is to canonicalize their pages to our pages, but then they wouldn't get any benefit--since a canonical tag will effectively de-index the content from their site. Our thoughts so far: add a paragraph of original content to our content link to our site as the original source (to help mitigate the risk of our site getting hit by any penalties) What are your thoughts on this? Do you think adding a paragraph of original content will matter much? Do you think our site will be free of penalty since we were the first place to publish the content and there will be a link back to our site? They are really pushing for not using a canonical--so this isn't an option. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
Need help or explanation on my site!
My site has suffered greatly since the recent Google update. I have done everything as suggested. I have had all bad links removed over 2 months ago. I have lowered keyword density (not easy since the keyword is in our company name!). I have rewritten various content and bolstered our existing content. What gives? What can I do? As an example the keyword, "maysville plumber" - I rank about 40th for this keyword. The first three pages are filled with websites with literally NO content or no added value. Maysville is a town of about 1k residents - there is no competition. Before the update I was #1 for years on this particular keyword. And this is the case with 35 other cities (mostly small cities, but a few larger ones). Please help me understand or suggest what I can possibly do at this point. We have hundreds of pages of unique content on each and every page. We have zero duplicate content (I have ran tests and crawlers). We have no fishy links. I have not gotten any messages from google on Webmasters. PLEASE HELP!! I asked a similar question a little while back and fixed all of the suggestions. My site is www.akinsplumbing.net.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | chuckakins0 -
ReLaunching a very old site
Hi, I am in the process of re-vamping a website that hasn't been touched for years and whose rankings slowly dropped. Any best practice in how to do it making sure that there's not any more loss and - hopefully - it could go back to the old glory? The website is http://www.nlp-world.com Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pdmonline0