Im running a campaign for a coupon site, coupons are added and expire weekly. What are the most important factors you think I should focus on
-
Coupon sites are unique as the content is fluid, coupons expire weekly, categories have thin content but the main goal is to get the merchants Macy's, Target, Best Buy coupons and indexed. Im looking for advice on technical SEO that may be unique to feed and affiliate site, what to block in the robots.txt ie affiliate urls such as /go and /gostore and categories Any advice and passionate discussion is welcome...
-
Everett
Perfect I see you got the gist of my conversation. What im going for is trying to keep the focus on the static and dynamic content while keeping the fluid content from bloating search results in the end I believe this is of benefit to search engines so they can separate the meat from the bone and I dont expend crawl budgets on thin content.
-
Rebecca...thank you for your passionate response this is what I love most about this business we all love what we do. I agree with what you have said and of course Im not looking for proprietary info we all have our techniques but in the end its all about great technical SEO as you discussed and Increasing organic traffic...my client has a pretty established site and with ppc efforts and technical SEO all the metrics have improved greatly more important they are seeing ROI. The part about cloaking links is some great info! thanks for your response appreciated.
-
Dmitrli,
Regarding the blocking of affiliate URLs in the robots.txt file, you can and probably should do this, by first running those through an internal link redirect. For example:
If the Merchant gives you the following URL:
http://www.merchant.com/affiliate-id=123&landing-page=abc
You wouldn't show that URL to Google or users. Instead, you would show them:
http://www.youraffiliatesite/affiliate-link?id=123
And then in your robots.txt would be:
Disallow: /affiliate-link?id=*
-
As someone who works in this space I'm not going to give away all of my secrets (sorry), but I can advise you to ask the following questions and consider the answers carefully when deciding what to do:
What are you offering on any given page that is unique or better than what the next coupon site offers? Are you saying something insightful or helpful about Macy's on the Macy's page?
What does the link/text ratio look like on that page?
Is the coupon content 100% unique to you, or are you pulling that content in from a feed that also services other coupon sites? (Basically, do you have a large scale duplicate content issue across websites you don't control?)
Are coupons listed on a merchant's page with each also existing as an individual page for each coupon, potentially creating a thin and duplicate content situation on site?
If you want individual coupons to be indexed, should they remain indexed once they've expired?
Are you using a redirecting URL to mask/beautify/track the affiliate link? Do you want that link to be indexed even though it's not actually a page with content? (Sounds a bit crazy but we've run into issues with that in the past, just like how bit.ly links can get indexed sometimes, defying all logic.)
(eg. yoursite.com/couponclick/1234 --> super ugly affiliate link --> merchant page)I'm going to be bluntly honest here, and not because I don't want the competition but just as a 5 year veteran in this niche and because you should know what you're getting into:
The coupon space is extremely difficult to break into. It is literally impossible emphasize this enough. The big players are very well established. Most of them aren't just offering coupons, but what I think of as "coupons+" (coupons + deals, coupons + cash back, coupons + charitable donation, etc.) and users respond to that and share it. RetailMeNot is deluged with high authority inbound links every time their stock moves a penny. Thin and duplicate content is endemic thanks to the ease of installing feeds, and making that content not just unique but also authoritative is easy to recommend but crazy difficult to implement at scale. Linkbuilding is next to impossible since no one really links to a Macy's coupon page, let alone a page for 2nd and 3rd tier stores without some kind of financial incentive, and Google gives no link credit for affiliate links (which should be nofollowed anyway). Users mostly aren't loyal to one site or another, they just want the coupon so they can get $5 off of some UGG boots. And when newcomers aren't able to cope or compete given all these difficulties, they often resort to blackhat tactics, making it even harder for those of us who keep things white hat to stay competitive (though Google has been much, much better about booting that crap since the Payday Loan update). Really, titles and metas, while it's important to get them right, are going to be the least of your challenges. Be thoughtful about the content, be user-friendly, find a way to stand out and you might have a shot.
-
Hi.
I'm not quite sure why you'd block anything in robots.txt. I hope you do understand how robots.txt works and the differences between meta robots, robots.txt, 301 redirects and canonicalization. If you are not so sure - here is a whiteboard friday about that: https://moz.com/blog/controlling-search-engine-crawlers-for-better-indexation-and-rankings-whiteboard-friday
I don't even know what you mean by "blocking affiliate URLs" in robots.txt and I'm quite sure that's not possible. About blocking categories - so, you wouldn't want them to be ranking? If so, still, I'd use meta robots NOINDEX, FOLLOW.
About meta descriptions - they are pretty much just for improving CTRs and not for rankings, so, if you're happy with snippets having just "store name, text, date of month" - then just do that.
However, "unique meta descriptions and titles and content on each merchant page to compete with the big boys" - this does make sense and does take place. You for sure want to have unique content to have any chance.
Hope this helps.
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
-
I'm routating keywords to find my website and to get better ranking; I know i want to use the most keywords that are prevelant in my site; iss that the only keywords I want to use for ranking purposes; if not what keywords were do i find them?
I want better page ranking for my website; keywords that work and backlinks;
Affiliate Marketing | | prostene13590 -
Stopping these scum sites from sending traffic.
What is the best way to deal with these: http://www.goldenclicking.com/ and www.payclicking.com They keep sending my site traffic, however I am not paying for it, and would prefer to stop these sites. The traffic never converts, and I can't see anywhere that I am paying for the traffic (they are not an affiliate, and can't see them on the GDN) - so I don't even know whats in it for them. Has anyone ever dealt with these types of sites previously, tips on getting them to stop. I was just considering black listing there domains so they can't even reach our site. Thanks in Advance. Andy
Affiliate Marketing | | Andy-Halliday0 -
Affiliate site
I have a client I am doing SEO work for. He sells a system that helps people win at video keno. He sells a system for like $200 that shows people step by step how to play and win. Its a good site and he has a ton of verified winnings. My point in saying that, its not a fly-by-night system he wrote in his basement. I know - gambling, not easy for SEO. I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner. Wouldn't this potentially be perfect for affiliate marketing? He offers a good commission to whoever sends him traffic if they buy. If anybody could direct me to a resource or two that is reputable and would handle as much of the set up and management of this I would be very grateful! Thank you! Matthew
Affiliate Marketing | | Mrupp440 -
What is the best way to boost no. of quality sites linking in?
Analysing my site ranking compared to competitors, I see that our weakness is getting others to share our content and link into it via their own blogs and social media - although I would say our social media activity is pretty good. We have also worked on getting listed free on relevant sites related to our product area (learn spanish in spain) in order to increase sites linking but this is still minute compared to our 2 main competitors. (As a note: paid listings are not totally justifiable for us at this point in time but perhaps in the future we will expand on this). Am I missing something here?
Affiliate Marketing | | sparkit0 -
Banner Ads Without Getting Penalised?
Hi All, Basically I have 3-4 Biggish video autoblogs that I keep tabs on and they pull videos on my niche and are actually decent quality websites they are just autoblogs as they automatically get the youtube videos. The issue is that I want to advertise my brandnew site on them as I'm selling a service in the same niche. I know that nofollow will not pass rank and should be safe but what is the absolute safest way to put banner advertisements on these sites without being penalised? I'm wanting the advertisements for advertisement purposes not link building. I'm worried about getting 10k+ links from the same domain x4 and google not only noticing that but linking the fact I own all 5 sites.. Any help would be great. Thanks
Affiliate Marketing | | LukeHutchinson0 -
How do the engines look at pages populated using content from an affiliate site?
We are building out a section of our site using an affiliate partnership in the travel space. How would you suggest organizing the content so we do not get penalized for duplicate content? Do you suggest not suing the content at all?
Affiliate Marketing | | TSDigital0 -
Link juice from my affiliates to my site
I'm setting up an affiliate program through 1shoppingcart. Even though I run 3 different websites, the way their program works is that I have to have 1 domain name that my affiliates get as their affiliate link, with their unique id attached at the end. I can give them multiple links that will redirect to various places on my 3 websites, but those original links that they put on their site will all be to just 1 domain. I'm wondering if I still get link juice to my sites even though the links are obviously being redirected? Does it depend on the redirection method? I was just thinking that getting hundreds of affiliates who run related sites could be a very good seo boost if they're all linking to my site, but I feel like it's going to be wasted because of this redirection thing. Hope this made sense. Thanks very much,
Affiliate Marketing | | philraymond
Phil0