Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Merchant´s data feed for affiliates is the same content as their own website...
-
Hi
Some advice appreciated. Started working on a site and found out that they are giving their unique content to their affiliates (an XML feed so appearing on another domain).
In this case, if they want to provide the data like that, how can we protect ourselves?
Should we use author tags in our html, is that necessary?
Is there any fix other than "stop doing that and give them different content"?
Thanks
-
"Your site wont get any penalties as long as your site was indexed first."
Who is indexed first does not matter. What matters is who has authority. Authority often wins even if last published.
-
Lots of affiliates are really really smart people. If you require them to use rel=canonical they will know what you are doing and what the result will be. So, if you have great affiliates don't do this to them unless you want to risk losing them.
I am an affiliate and if the program manager told me to rel=canonical my pages to his I would reply.... "you point your pages to MY site or I am leaving".
I would not be linking to them either because their product might go through a shopping cart on my domain.
If I ran an affiliate program and had very valuable and smart affiliates I would produce new content for my own site that takes me out of competition with the affiliates and let them know that they are free to use the data feed or create their own unique descriptions. But that descriptions on my site are off limits.
You don't want your superaffiliates jumping to the competition or becoming your competition. They are not married to you and even if they are they will file for divorce.
-
"Your site wont get any penalties as long as your site was indexed first."
So that´s 100% the case, if we were indexed first and our content is indexed no need to worry?
-
I am not sure whether that's a good solution or not, but look into the option of providing no product description in your feed. Just the Product Name, Categories, Tags/Attributes etc. Maybe a shorter version of the description...First 100 characters maybe ? That would at-least protect from future datafeed consumers....
-
It would be great if their was a plugin or Feed setting that automatically added the canonical tag for you, but im not sure about that.
If they are scraping the content via feeds, then you could include a link to the same page in the content.
Create a link in the content linking to the page URL so that when people scrape the content, the link will still be on other websites, linking to the original source. (do this creatively, perhaps hyperlink the page title in the article)
Your site wont get any penalties as long as your site was indexed first.
Greg
-
Hi
The websites on which our content will be appearing also pull XML info from many websites so we can´t control them as tightly as ourselves.
Is there anything we can do on our own pages to ensure we get authorship (I though Author tags, no), so we allow them to have the content but google always understands our´s is the original?
Both your solutions mean action on another company´s site.
-
Hi
You have 2 options.
1.) Add a rel=canonical tag on their page with the URL to the original content on your website.
2.) Link to the original content via a URL or text link on their pages
From Matt Cutts:
_We've had a lot of interest in these meta tags, particularly in how the syndication-source tag relates to rel=canonical. After evaluating this feedback, we’ve updated our system to use rel=canonical instead of syndication-source, if both are specified. _
If you know the full URL, rel=canonical is preferred, and you need not specify syndication-source.
If you know a partial URL, or just the domain name, continue using syndication-source.
We've also had people ask "why metatag instead of linktag"? We actually support both forms for the tag, and you can use either. However, we believe the linktag form is more in line with the spirit of the standard, and encourage new users to implement the linktag form rather than the metatag form we originally proposed.
Greg
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
-
My affiliate links are being crawled by Google. Is this a bad thing? Also, should I add rel: nofollow to affiliate links?
Hi All, I have an issue on Google Search Console. It seems all my affiliate links are being crawled. Is this a bad thing? The reason I found out is that all but one link was flagged with a warming. It goes on to say that it was blocked by robots.txt. The strange thing is that I've not set any links to be blocked in robots.txt. Also, should affiliate links be nofollow? I'm asking because I was recently sent this article by Yoast on how to properly cloak my affiliate links without using a plugin. https://yoast.com/cloak-affiliate-links/ In the method, they apply the nofollow and noindex rules to the links. I'm just a little confused on how to go about affiliate links the SEO friendly way.
Affiliate Marketing | | nomad_blogger0 -
What is the danger of integrating different affiliate program widgets far under our core content?
We have pages with lots of unique content that are ranking very well in google.
Affiliate Marketing | | lcourse
I am now considering to add towards the end of the pages widgets from the booking.com affiliate program and also from the affiliate program of two other accommodtion sites. These affilliate widgets would be placed far beyond our core content in the bottom 15% of the page. Each widget will contain a large number of links to the different accomodation options that booking.com or others offer. In our context this information would be indeed very useful for our visitors. Shall I be concerned that our google rankings may suffer due to google perceiving our site as less quality (or google misinterpreting our intent to generate traffic to affiliate programs) ? If google rankings would be suffering, is this something we would normally see in a week (most of our pages are crawled daily by google) and then recover in a week when we would remove the widgets or would this generally be something that would affect the ranking over the course of a month or more? Shall I be concerned abou link dillution since my pages would now have a lot of links pointing to the affiliate sites, which could devalue my internal links? Any thoughts?0 -
What's the best way to go about making Duplicate Content Pages on my domain for affiliates?
Hello, I would like to make a bunch of duplicate pages of my site's Home Page, that way affiliates of mine can have a page of their own with links specialized to themselves littered throughout the page. What's the best practice going about this without jeopardizing domain authority from tons of duplicate content signals firing off?
Affiliate Marketing | | Benavest0 -
Is Affiliate Duplicate Content?
Hi moz fans!
Affiliate Marketing | | KasperK
I'm working on some client sites.
They have a lot of products, which they are selling through their webshop and two affiliate sites.
But I can't stop wondering:
The affilate sites are using the same product descriptions and images - Will Google see that as duplicate content?
And if so.. How can I prevent that? The two affiliate sites are well etablished and huge sites, so I guess they know what they are doing.. Is there some way I can check it? When I do a google search, whit the "My product description text", I'm getting some different results: Sometimes all three sites appear (main site, and affilate) Sometimes it's only the affilates Sometimes it's only the main site. So to make it short:
If i'm using affliate, will Google see it as duplicate content?
How do I check it, and how do I prevent it? Thank you!0 -
How to setup affiliate marketing for my website?
I work for an ecommerce company and would like to setup some sort of affiliate marketing similar to Amazon. 1. If someone was referred to our site and they made a purchase we would pay out. 2. If we referred a user to someone else's page and they made a purchase we would get paid. I looked into http://www.commissionfactory.com/ but wasn't sure if that would meet my needs. Does anyone have any recommendations?
Affiliate Marketing | | EcommerceSite0 -
How do you find Affiliate Links on your site that have not been nofollowed?
We've just signed up to an affiliate scheme because we were sending links to them because we thought their product was valuable to our users. So we now have to go through and nofollow all of these links over 100's of pages. Is there any way that do a crawl of the site to identify all links to a particular site and tell me what page they are on and whether they are nofollow/follow?
Affiliate Marketing | | Zippy-Bungle0 -
Affiliate URLs Indexed in Google
We have an active in-house affiliate program which has a create-a-link function where affiliate, as in most affiliate programs, can build links back to our content to produce sales. The problem that I am seeing is that some of the affiliate URL versions are being indexed in Google rather than the original page. For instance.. http://www.ourdomain.com/page_start.aspx?affnum=F025212&Start_Page=RaceCar&referrer=createlink is outranking... http://www.ourdomain.com/racecar This presents 2 issues for us. First, this presents duplicate content issues obviously. Second, we pay our affiliates a portion of the sales so, in order to maximize profitability, we'd like the indexed pages to be the original version. What's the best way to handle this? I want to make sure that affiliates continue to get credit for links from their sites but search engine links should go to the original versions.
Affiliate Marketing | | ATIseo0 -
How much link juice passes through urls with affiliate id's?
hi we can get a valuable link with the desired anchor text from a news site. the destination url would be something like www.site.com/product. but in order to track conversions, our sales team would like to add an affiliate id to the url, so that it would look like this: www.site.com/product?sess_affiliate=ta how much link juice would a link to this affiliate url pass? would we be shooting our wad by linking to the ?sess-URL instead of the original URL?
Affiliate Marketing | | zeepartner0