Cloaking Affiliate Links (Video Explanation)
January 2, 2008
Affiliate links can hurt your Google search engine rankings, this video explains why as well as steps to take to cloak or mask your links.
Ranking well in Google is all about understanding what Google wants to accomplish (to provide relevant quality results to their users). It also involves understanding various “filters” Google employs to rank a site and or webpage. What is a “filter” you may ask, I like to think of Google filters as “monitors”.
The Google filter will monitor various aspects of a website / and or a web page. As information about a page or site is taken in Google uses this data to help “rank sites”. Let me explain more:
Lets say you launch a brand new domain and website. Google finds your new domain / site on January 2, 2008. At the time the google bot notes your domain has three pages: a homepage, about us page and one article page. Ten days later the google bot returns and spiders your new domain / site to find over 10,000 new pages.
This is important information that Google will use when ranking your site. It is widely believed that Google penalizes sites that grow in size (number of pages) too fast. So this type of growth would most likely hurt your site ranking.
An affiliate link tells Google a lot about your site, with no human intervention. This is not a good thing and can dramatically hurt your ranking, the video below will further explain.
As mentioned in the video their are several ways to protect your site:
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Use javascript (bots can not read javascript)
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Use a redirect on your site (I use a simple php redirect and that seams to work just fine)
Here is my php code:
<?php
header( ‘Location: http://www.yoursite.com/new_page.html’ ) ;
?>
Make sure to place that code first in your .php page. Otherwise it will not work.
To Your Success,
Brian J
Thanks for the vid.
Wow,
Brian, very nice. I am reviewing my google guidlines now. Thanks
Ronald
Hi Brian,
Great video and very timely for me. As you suggested for the new year I’m going to focus on web development. My first effort isn’t a wordpress blog but it is monitized with google adsense, ebay listings, Amazon listings and affiliate links - primarily Clickbank. So your new video where you spoke about google penalizing your rank for affiliate links was really timely for me. When you get a chance take a look at VegasVacationSavings.com and tell me what you think- I’d appreciate any suggestions you have to make it better. I’ll be adding more articles within the next few days to increase the content value.
I’ve used both a plain redirect and a frame redirect in the past. A frame redirect is actually a better way of cloaking your page but there are some disadvantages. How important do you feel it is to maintain your “real” url in the browser window. Some of the redirect techniques, while effective in cloaking your url from google, will now show the redirected url in your visitor’s brower. If I’m trying to get people to remember the domain name I selected based on my keyword research, and get them to come back should that be a concern?
I’ve used redirects basically to redirect an entire web site. With what I’m doing now at VegasVacationSavings.com there might be several different affiliate links for different products on the same page. How do I use a redirect for that?
All the best,
Ted Sudol
Hi Ted,
Here are some tips for you:
1. I do not see a meta description .. this is very important.
2. Looks like your using content from another site already online - big mistake.
The site “looks good” to humans ..
But you need to think about google with the meta descriptions and you can not use content from other sources.
Adsense: I would guess your adsense placement will get a very low ctr. Right now it is not blended in a place where people will click.
Try to get the adsense below the header and worked into the content area, make sure to blend ads with background colors.
Ted, all in all this is a positive start. I would say you might want to think about launching 1 new site monthly or every other month. This way you can really work on it and drive traffic. I can do more Ted because I have a system and also pay people to create unique content for me.
Make sense?
Brian
Heloo Brian, I would like to ask, do you know how to cut the bids of PPC CPC,what i mean so that we can get a cheaper bid to make the keywords active, and also if you have any source like forum or blog about this trick, please let me know
Thank You
To this point I have not sent any traffic to (or enough to recommend any methods) affiliate pages via ppc. I work on creating niche content sites and drive via free seo traffic.
Brian