Google & SEO Friendly Affiliate Programs - Part III

Looks like a cool blog. Will have a look on it often!

Nice to see someone actually doing stuff with content!

Thanks. I will be adding as much details as I can over the next few weeks.

Nice. Another one for my bookmarks.

Bookmarked. Thanks Baddog.

All thanks go to goodgirl, she just makes me look good.

And here you thought I was the one that looked good

well, in entirely different ways.

bump for a great "different" resource and articles site!

Unless I have misunderstood, this 'series' has made claims that some sponsors do not honor affiliate code links depending on what domains the links are on (eg. a direct SERP).

Much of your 'seo' discussion has been based on protecting oneself from getting cut out of the SE loop by these sponsors.

Can you offer some qualitative perspective on how many sponsors we are talking about here?

What percentage of sponsors ignore affiliate code links in the way that you have suggested?

Are we talking 50/50?

Or is this a rare exception?

For the amount of discussion (3 parts over several days), one could get the impression that this is a huge problem and, unless one protects their site, they may lose lots of traffic they have built through SEO to all these sponsors.

I have never heard of a sponsor not counting a properly formed affiliate link.

I have always manually checked that my links get counted in my stats and I don't use sponsors which don't disclose real-time detailed stats.

Who are all these sponsors you refer to (which merit this concern)?

Thanks
-Dino

Hi Dino,

There are so many sponsors available, I can't tell you what each one does or doesn't do. What I suggest is that you read their TOS or ask them.

Many times pay per click sponsors will monitor where clicks come from, to reduce their chance of paying for clicks that were fraudulent.

Some sponsors may be domain specific so they can monitor where their services or memberships are being offered. Reduces their chances of showing up in sites that could cause them legal problems. Can't blame them for that either.

I'm definitely not saying they are doing this on purpose. They have to protect themselves from fraud, spammers, and sites they don't want to be apart of.

Here is an example of just one affiliate script backend. This script is built to work with a popular store script. (Oscommerce).




Notice the Tie to URL. When set to true, this script would ignore all sales generated from anywhere other than the affiliates domain.

Many sponsors are not domain specific as far as I know. It would be hard for them to be, with as many free hosts that are being used. But I can't say what their policies are or how their script works.

It was such a good question Dino that you have been rewarded some free advertising in part IV, Domain Specific Sponsors

Thread has been bookmarked. This is a great resource thread.