I wish I knew why!?

[tony data]

Hi all,

First post so be gentle!

I've been scouring the SEW forums for a week or so now and just cannot seem to find the answer to my problem...? :confused:

I work for a large online retailer that runs a referrer programme where clubs/teams etc... can link to us and we give them commission. Fairly simple stuff, was started out originally to gain customers but now is obviously doing us good with the search engines.

Following quite a major site overhaul we have been re-indexed by Google, I changed our meta tags so I can see the pages listed are the new ones, great, we are front page #1 for most of our products.

For some reason, the point of my post, Yahoo.co.uk still continues to rank our url with a referrer's ID in it higher than the actual page it is landing on, which is ours!? :mad:

An example would be a search for "white lightning original lubricant"

Top two results are:

www.wiggle.co.uk/?ReferID=j.g.o.a.r&ProductID=5300003784

Our new page with correct meta's, but with a refer ID tagged on the end?

And then second, our old page...

www.wiggle.co.uk/search_results_manu.asp?Manufacturer=White+Lightni ng?

Any idea's as to why this is?

Any help would be great...

If I've done anything wrong in this post, I apologise in advance!

[Marcia]

I work for a large online retailer that runs a referrer programme where clubs/teams etc... can link to us and we give them commission.OK, so it's an affiliate program and they're linking with referrers so they get their commission.

For some reason, the point of my post, Yahoo.co.uk still continues to rank our url with a referrer's ID in it higher than the actual page it is landing on, which is ours!? You could have a different landing page for affiliate links to point to or run through for tracking.

This could take some back end modifications for dealing with the affiliate links, which is beyond what I know so hopefully someone will come along who knows what to do with that.

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

Hi Tony

I think I see your concern. If the affiliate outranked you because of their own efforts and the #1 link went to their site, you would not have a problem. The issue is that the link is going directly to your site?

I have seen this happen quite often and it's usually a search engine anomaly. It's been reported to happen a lot in Google and that's where I have seen it the most. I think this is the 1st time I've heard a merchant report it happening with Y.

There was an article awhile back about it, but I am unable to find it right now. I did search through my blog for some other related articles and found these 2 which may be helpful.

How Affiliate Programs Can Affect Search Rankings
http://www.clickz.com/experts/search/results/article.php/3497826

Should Affiliate Link Point to the Merchant's Domain?
http://www.wilsonweb.com/art/ads/affiliate_links.htm

The only personal experience I have had similar to this was an affiliate who had done a domain re-direct to the merchant domain. They weren't using the domain, were to busy to build a site, so just redirected it to the merchant. Since the affiliate's site had higher PR and more back links, his re-directed URL link leap frogged many of the merchant's rankings for the top key words. I had the affiliate remove the re-direct and the merchants rankings eventually recovered. So you may check with the affiliate to see if that's what they are doing.

That's all I can think of right now but hope it helps.

[Marcia]

Run the affiliate's URL that's shown in at the search engine through the HTTP Viewer at http://www.rexswain.com/

Any number of them may 302 and that's a way to check, but it'll be a good idea to check on other solutions to prevent it happening in the first place.

[tony data]

Thanks for this guys...
I am just amazed that for some reason Google or Yahoo rank redirect pages higher than the "actual" page your being re-directed to? We're always directly below?
It kind of smacks in the face of affiliate programmes (ours is more about putting a bit of cash back into grass roots cycling, but, as always there's one or two entrepeneurs you gotta deal with!) providing some sort of added value to a customer in the form of say a review or something similiar...
I WILL get to the bottom of this though. We track all our sales via our refer ID internall tracking and there seems to be an amazing correlation between the products sold via this means and the high ranking products success in the search engines... I have no problem with paying people adding value to our customers expeirance, I just can't stand cheeky, clever free loaders!
Cheers again, if you have any more thoughts let me know...
Matt

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

Hey Matt,

Hope you get it figured out!

You said:I just can't stand cheeky, clever free loaders

Totally understand your concern, but keep in mind this sometimes happens without affiliates trying to do it on purpose. Could have been intentional, but maybe not. Wish I had a more specific answer for you.

Anyone else have any ideas or suggestions for Matt???

[tony data]

5*,

Here's a classic example of what I'm talking about... search for hydration systems gives these results...

http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?fr=fp-tab-web-t-1&ei=ISO-8859-1&p=hydration+systems&meta=vc%3D

Affiliate #2 - with my new meta tags in the title and the new site address i.e no .asp?

#5 one of our old pages!?!?!?

I just can't understand how Yahoo rate this (referrer) page above ours. When I look at the purchase logs it is so obvious that this is the place he is making all his cash, what frustrates me is that we're on the same results page... Grrrrrrrrr! Yahoo sucks....

So you think he maybe using a redirect page?

Matt

[Marcia]

Matt, Yahoo can't be expected to make all the server modification on the sites they index. Here's what the header looks like with the affiliate's URL that's ranking

http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html
Parameters:
URL = http://www.wiggle.co.uk/?Category=hydration+systems&referid=cb
UAG = Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
AEN =
REQ = GET ; VER = 1.1 ; FMT = AUTO
Sending request:
GET /?Category=hydration+systems&referid=cb HTTP/1.1
Host: www.wiggle.co.uk
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
Connection: close

• Finding host IP address...
Host IP address = 212.241.172.101
• Finding TCP protocol...
• Binding to local socket...
• Connecting to host...
• Sending request...
• Receiving response...

Total bytes received = 18737
Elapsed time so far: 3 seconds
Header (Length = 383):
HTTP/1.1·200·OK(CR)(LF)
Server:·Microsoft-IIS/5.0(CR)(LF)
Date:·Wed,·01·Jun·2005·10:23:25·GMT(CR)(LF)
X-Powered-By:·ASP.NET(CR)(LF)
Connection:·close(CR)(LF)
X-AspNet-Version:·1.1.4322(CR)(LF)
Set-Cookie:·ASP.NET_SessionId=yvxgkf55ax2bhlya0kv3qwml ;·path=/(CR)(LF)
Set-Cookie:·ReferID=ReferID=cb;·expires=Mon,·12-Dec-2005·00:00:00·GMT;·path=/(CR)(LF)
Cache-Control:·private(CR)(LF)
Content-Type:·text/html;·charset=utf-8(CR)(LF)
Content-Length:·18354(CR)(LF)
(CR)(LF)Dig out the page the link is coming from on their site, find the URL as it's in their code on their page and run it through the HTTP viewer.

(Don't post their URL here, though)

If they're the only ones you can ask them to change how they're linking, or more are doing it, possibly ISAPI_rewrite which is the IIS equivalent of mod_rewrite could rewrite those URLs on the backend. An IIS person would have to get in here to go any further with that.

I suspect that the easiest way would be to have an alternate landing page that the affiliate's customers arrive at that's robots.txt excluded from indexing, that way there's no chance of confusion.

I am NOT a back-end person, these are just some guesses/ideas for you to check out.

[tony data]

Hi Marcia,

Cheers for your help again... any idea how I "Dig out the page the link is coming from on their site, find the URL as it's in their code on their page"???

Cheers
Matt

[5starAffiliatePrograms]

Marcia said:
I am NOT a back-end person

Hehe, Marcia, you are a lot more technical than I am and seem to be offering some good techy detective work.

Tony,

Don't know if this helps you any but... I just did a search for "referid=cb" in quotes on Yahoo and there are 8 pages of results, most of which are pages from your site with his ID attached. Looking at the other URLS in that list could provide some clues, maybe??? The 1st affiliate ID you referred to in the serps that outranked you does not have other pages that I could find.

Have you looked at his site to see how he is displaying your links? Can you tell by your tracking stats if he is making sales from any regular links on HIS site or if they are all coming from direct link on Yahoo? In CJ you can see where the referring hits are coming from.

Have you tried just asking this affiliate how he is doing this and asking him to stop? Since people are not clicking through to his site, he is not adding value to your program. Non techy solution, just plain old talking. ;)

[tony data]

Chaps/Chappesses...

I just cannot see how/why Yahoo does not spider our new site and rank it top like it has with this #1 result but with a referID? It makes absolutely no sense, especially considering it ranks our old site at #2? Have we not done something we should have?

http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=utf-8&fr=slv1-&p=concurve+fast+vest

Aggggghhhhhh! this is totally baffleing me... there must be a reason it does this... I mean, the site listed at #1 is ours, but why the refer ID? And then why list the old site at #2 with a "untitled" title? When you hit #2 it takes you through to exactly the same place #1 does? I know top 2 ranking is great, but I'd rather just have #1 and not have to pay for it, what's the point in doing well in organic's if you gotta pay!? What is that affiliate actually doing that we, the page owners, are not?

It must be something we haven't done? Is it anything to do with the fact the actual site is frames and that #1 might come from a non-frame affiliate site?

Any more thoughts guys?

[Marketing Guy]

Could it be you missed the boat with the recent Yahoo update? If you made the changes after their last crawl pre-update the changes wont be reflected in the SERPs. Yahoo seem slow to update - might not necessarily be something to do with your site setup.

There seems to be an issue with your www subdomain and non www version being listed (cached version of the non www redirects to www version). Could just be a combination of factors - updating your site during a major crawl period, SERP update, redirects, etc? Sorry not too tech here - just throwing thoughts on the table! ;)

MG

[tony data]

I thought we caught it though, new site's been live for a while...? At least 8 weeks? Maybe more...?
Another example of weirdness? New site #1 old site #2? But new site, no refer ID?
http://uk.search.yahoo.com/search?p=Ronhill+Classic+Short+Sleeve+T-Shirt+&prssweb=Search&ei=UTF-8&fr=fp-tab-web-t-1&fl=0&vc=countryUK&x=wrt&meta=vc%3DcountryUK

I reckon this might be the death of me eventually?!