Search Engine Optimization
No Country for Duplicate Content
A word to the wise - always take free content from your affiliate merchant networks, especially articles with a grain of salt or risk getting penalized by Google for duplicate content.
Love it or hate it, Google has the lion’s share of traffic on the internet. A duplicate content penalty means you could end up in the sandbox, and this will impact your site negatively in two major ways:
- You will see a huuuge decrease in your Pagerank, e.g. pr 6 to a pr 3 or even a pr 4 drop to pr 0!
- You won’t get anymore organic search engine traffic from Google
That last part is the most problematic, because as an affiliate that’s going to hit you in the wallet - the only way you can drive traffic to your sites now are with paid campaigns.Free resources are great, the problem is hundreds or thousands of other affiliates promoting the same product also have access. However, if you’re not the original source of the content, you have a duplicate content problem. When googlebot indexes the web, who gets credit for the original content if more than 1 copy is found?
Duplicate content is a very touchy subject - what’s a webmaster to do if a hot original post gets picked up by a higher ranking SERP site such as Digg or Reddit? Some say the first site to get indexed gets the credit, others say the site with the most relevant links does - because google equates relevant links with authority.
It’s hard to say exactly how Google checks for duplicate content because Google is very secretive about their methods, but Google is very good at catching it. I like to use free content as a springboard to writing my own original content. I try to retain roughly 30% of the free resource (in order to maintain keyword relevancy) and rewrite the other 70%. A big advantage I get from re-writing the free content myself (as opposed to paying someone to do it for me) is that it helps me think of keywords and search phrases for the related ppc campaign.
Either way, the ORACLE has spoken …. How do you deal with duplicate content?
Are you Cloaking your Affiliate Links?
As an affiliate marketer, there may be many reasons why you might want to consider cloaking your affiliate links:
- Preventing other affiliates from stealing or hijacking your links
- Better link management - A merchant may expire or get dropped from an affiliate network and you need to reflect those changes on your site. It’s much easier to update the link in one location and have a sitewide effect as opposed to trying to remember everywhere you used that particular affiliate link. I learned the hard way when I couldn’t figure out why I kept getting invalid links in my commission junction reports.
- Normal affiliate links are very long - e.g. yoursite.com/product.php vs www.merchantwebsite/mumbo12121jumbo……r&23232@%$?ref=affid=007 - which one would you click on?
- You may want to cloak the links from search engines or prevent bots from crawling the links
- Users are more likely to click on clean looking links, increasing your affiliate conversion rates
There are many ways to mask your affiliate links - I’m only going to cover a few. The most easiest way is by a simple .htaccess redirect method. Let’s say we want to launch a campaign promoting mangoes from a fictional merchant “selfpreneursmangomania.com”.
- Create a .htacess file at the root of your site (use notepad or any other plain text editor)
- Add the following: redirect 301 /buymangoes http://www.selfpreneursmangomania.com/mumbo12121jumbo….r&23232@%$?ref=affid=007
You’re done. Redirect 301 just tells search engine spiders that the links you are redirecting to are not on your site. “Somename” is whatever you want to call what you’re marketing. Your masked link will now be something like yoursite/buymangoes.
The problem with using the .htacess file to manage your links is that after a while, as the .htaccess file grows larger your site will slow down. Everytime there is a request, the server checks the .htaccess file. The more links you have in there, the longer it takes to read etc.
URL Redirection sites are another method of hiding your affiliate links.
- Go to a site like tinyurl.com
- Enter your affliate link
- Use the resulting the link the site will give you, something like http://tinyurl.com/3drlg3
Use http://tinyurl.com/3drlg3 wherever you want to market that item. The problem with this method is that the link doesn’t really look nice. It’s short, confusing and you’ve just handed control of your affiliate link to another company.
In my humble opinion, the best method of hiding your affiliate links in my opinion is by using php redirects along with a robots.txt file.
- Create a file called buymangoes.php in a subdirectory on your site
- Open up your .htaccess file (create one if you don’t have one at the root of your directory) and add the affiliate link you are given in the location area <? header(”Location: http://www.yourwebsite/mumbo12121jumbo….r&23232@%$?ref=affid=007); ?>. So now your affiliate link should be within the file called buymangoes.php. The link that refers to that particular gadget will now be yoursite/subdirectory/buymangoes.php
- At your root directory, create a file called robots.txt and add:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /subdirectory/
This tells bots not to ignore links that for items in that subdirectory. This way if you ever need to manage your links just look for the php file and edit the php file accordingly.
Last but not the least, always make sure that whatever program you’re promoting allows the use of redirects. Why do all that hard work to pluck those mangoes only to find out that you can’t eat them?
Know of an even better method? Let us know in the comments section.
