Are affiliate sites being punished?

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thesadshow

Registered Member

Apr 19, 2013

58

9

• Apr 24, 2013

• #1

I have a few websites monetized by subscriptions and I was interested in getting into affiliate marketing. The problem is that I get my traffic through SEO and a guy was telling me earlier that affiliate sites (or more accurately, sites with affiliate links etc.) are hard to rank on Google now cause they don't like them. Is this true? Is it hard to rank an affiliate site these days?

Any input would be awesome, thanks.

 

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thesadshow

Registered Member

Apr 19, 2013

58

9

• Apr 25, 2013
• Thread Starter Thread Starter

• #2

This is something a lot of you guys would know about so any help would really be appreciated.

 

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dragonrage01

Power Member

May 19, 2011

674

159

• Apr 25, 2013

• #3

I don't really notice any difference but I usually hide my links using htaccess and redirects.
This is purely because most people tend to not click on links with long target urls that make no sense when you read them.

 

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thesadshow

Registered Member

Apr 19, 2013

58

9

• Apr 25, 2013
• Thread Starter Thread Starter

• #4

dragonrage01 said:

I don't really notice any difference but I usually hide my links using htaccess and redirects.
This is purely because most people tend to not click on links with long target urls that make no sense when you read them.

Click to expand...

Thanks brother. Do you redirect a sub-domain for each affiliate link or just a page? I think the htaccess option would probably be above me.

 

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mast3r0flol

Registered Member

Jul 11, 2012

62

14

• Apr 25, 2013

• #5

Its not exactly that Google doesn't like Affiliate sites...

The reason why you see a lot of Affiliate sites not ranking as well in Google is because a lot of affiliate sites have THIN CONTENT.
The Panda update in 2011/2012 as you know has hurt sites and brought their rankings down if they didn't think of the user first and provided good content for the users.

 

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TJchiller

Junior Member

Mar 23, 2011

193

88

• Apr 25, 2013

• #6

There are affiliate sites which are ranking high in several niches who uses raw affiliate url's or aff banners. However, I like to put my aff links in a php redirect myself.

 

omnipotent$

Regular Member

Mar 23, 2013

493

290

• Apr 25, 2013

• #7

As long as Google doesn't see your site as "sales focused", you should be able to rank just fine. It's the manual review that kills off some of those affiliate sites.

 

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Danny1111

Elite Member

Jul 5, 2011

2,111

2,504

• Apr 25, 2013

• #8

this is just my opinion - but if your Site is not simply spamming affiliate links - but has organized content / images etc and solves peoples problems you can fly under the radar especially if you use some plugins to control your links.....

however if you have a "thin" content site then its a matter of time --- the other obvious issue is a manual review and in that case you need to be using custom themes etc - so you can show your making an effort -- cookie cutter type sites may sink like the titanic.

Google seems really fast to find crap content at the moment - so you will know pretty quickly the good and the bad.

 

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thesadshow

Registered Member

Apr 19, 2013

58

9

• Apr 25, 2013
• Thread Starter Thread Starter

• #9

Thanks everybody I appreciate the replies. I'll have to check out how to do a php redirect since 2 people have mentioned it. I always make quality sites with good content but I just don't want to waste my time and effort on making a good useful site and then get punished for trying to make money.