Blackhat Clickbank Redirect Day One

[hustle4dough]

I built a website to sell a Clickbank product a while ago and right now it ranks at #3 in Google. Arguably #2, since the first two results are different pages of the same website. Since I haven't been getting the sales I want from this site (some, but not enough), I've decided to conduct a little experiment. I set up a redirect so the domain goes directly to my hoplink, so when people click on my site's search result in Google they are now taken directly to the product's landing page. While I don't get to do any pre-selling this way, I'll have a CTR of exactly 100%. I know Google doesn't "like" this, so I'll be checking every day to see how long I can go without getting penalized/deindexed/whatever, and I'll report back with my results. Some more details: The keyword has some competition but not a whole lot, and it gets about 9900 searches per month globally. While my site is at #3, the landing page for the product itself (which my site is now redirecting to) ranks at #9 right now.

 

[uby21]

let us know how it goes, I'm very curious

 

[jerzydawg]

I would love to know the results as well.

 

[OTrap]

Why not just copy the landing page and put it on that domain as well?

 

[midnight_focus]

That's an interesting experiment, I was thinking of doing this for a couple days and then go back to normal, that way it might take a longer time for G to notice

 

[letsdoit]

better iframe it than redirect

 

[poorboi]

Yeah, you should clone the sales page and put it on your homepage; and maybe where it says BUY NOW, redirect that to your hoplink. No risks involved I believe.

 

[jerzydawg]

Is it safe to iframe CB landing pages with your hop link?

 

[snipertomcat]

Ooo that's a good question because its things like that can make or break you. I would think that there shouldn't be a problem unless your generating a really large click count

 

[spoon22]

I believe the next time google visits your site you won't find your site in the top ten anymore. But interesting though, pls let us know how it goes.

 

[drogon]

Next time your site gets crawled it will disappear out of the top 1000. You are not so far from top spot and better off using your efforts to work on both your on page and off page seo to get there. iFrame, cloning and redirecting your site is very very short term view and will get you less success and sales than working to be number 1 for your keyword.

 

[spoon22]

Any updates on this?

 

[hustle4dough]

yeah, sorry it took so long for me to update. here's what happened: by day two, the search listing for my site changed from "my site's title" to "the sales page's title," with the sales page's text as the text excerpt, but my domain listed as the url in green. it had moved up from position two to position one. also, the sales page's listing, with hop=0 was not on the first page any more, since i guess google won't have two pages with the same title and text excerpt simultaneously. however, by day three, it was gone. my domain has been de-indexed from google, and not only that, the sales page with hop=0 for the product i was promoting is no longer anywhere in the first 10 pages of google, and i haven't looked farther than that.

however, i did find one variation of the sales page, not the main one, on page 8. while originally productname.com was on the first page of google for my keyword, taking visitors to the sales page with hop=0, now all i can find is productname.com/somethingrelatedtotheproduct with a different sales page that talks about something related to the product, but sells the same product. unlike my domain, which has been de-indexed, you can still find the product's page in position one if you type productname.com or product name into google. it just isn't there for my keyword any more. i feel bad because i feel like i may have caused this to happen, so i've removed the redirect. if anyone has any advice on how i can or should make it up to the product owner or help him get his site back on the first page for the keyword i was targeting, let me know. at any rate, i wasn't expecting this to work for very long and i was right about that. i advise everyone to stay away from this one.

 

[ventureman]

interesting keep us updated!

 

[OTrap]

interesting keep us updated!

Um, the experiment is pretty much over. Did you not get that?

 

[JackSparrow]

I've done this and believe me it will not only f@ck up the rankings of your website, but will result in far fewer visits from the search engines if you decide to put things back as it was and your rankings return.

Before i did the redirect i was getting 500 visitors a day with the sales steadily dropping off.

So i had the idea of just redirecting my url to the top selling product, within 3 days my website had dropped from the strong ranking positions it was, resulting in less visitors and no sales.

I put everything back to it was before, and thankfully my rankings returned within a week. But i'm now only seeing 100 visitors a day instead of 500 and still not getting any sales.

So my advice would be to just add content related to other keywords related with the product, so you are ranking first page for every long-tail keyword that gets visitors to your page.

 

[spoon22]

Did the redirect had any affect on your sales (for those 3 days).

 

[hustle4dough]

Did the redirect had any affect on your sales (for those 3 days).

no, but the most sales i ever got from that site was three in a month, which is why i considered it expendable in the first place.

 

[redstone.1337]

LOL. You seriously did a 301 redirection? You could have better used a javascript redirect and hide it from the bots.

 

[deepsheet]

This strategy, in the long run is useless. Big G won't keep you ranked with a redirect. Especially with their new "bear" filters, they are looking for unique content.

My suggestion, with any other site, the one you did this with is fucked, is to work on tweeking you page to promote a good CTR.

Or as some above have suggested, try cloning the Clickbank sales page.