Sep 10
4

Q&A: Duplicate Content Affiliate Sites And Affects On SEO?

1 Comment

Question by caza_line: Duplicate Content Affiliate Sites And Affects On SEO?
Hi,

Can someone tell me if an affiliate which has several domains but the same content, will affect any SEO rankings? I have found some products for example Wooden Garden Furniture on affiliate sites, and some of the domain names are not keywords I would search for my product on, i would expect to find other stuff such as quilts and labels. I’m pretty new to this affiliate stuff, and currently using an agency but I don’t know if this is standard practice. Any practical advice would be much appreciated

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Best answer:

Answer by Iain Johnstone
The best practice for affiliate marketing is to find a product you like and can easily learn about or already have some knowledge in that area.
You then want to find appropriate keywords related to the product. You are also aiming to find keywords with low competition and a available domain name.
The idea is although your content isn’t unique your keyword rich domain name as well as you backlinks will all target people who are looking for the type of product you are selling.

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This entry was posted on September 4, 2010 at 1:14 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in SEO by optimise my web site 1 Comment

1 Response to "Q&A: Duplicate Content Affiliate Sites And Affects On SEO?"

  • Reggie says:
    September 4, 2010 at 1:35 pm

    Sure, substantially duplicate content may affect some websites’ ability to rank highly for certain keywords. Speaking only in terms of Google, and speaking hypothetically, here’s an example.

    Let’s say that you are promoting an affiliate product, and you have a standard description that is supplied by the vendor / affiliate network. You may use this description (which usually ends up being the web page’s content or text), but there’ll likely be hundreds or thousands of other people using the exact same content as you are. While the duplicate content does work against you in a way because it’s not unique, that’s hardly the only ‘problem’ you’ll encounter if you’re trying to obtain favorable search engine rankings for your affiliate page.

    Google uses hundreds of ‘signals’ (ranking factors) to determine the ranking of a web page for a specific keyword query. If the affiliate product description is a good match for a specific query, Google will show the affiliate page of the website they determine to be the most relevant for the query based on all of their ranking factors at the top of their results. In other words, Google doesn’t rely on a page’s content alone (affiliate product description) to determine where a web-page ranks.

    While adding unique content to your affiliate product description may help, the bigger picture is that if you have an established (older), trusted (has Google Page Rank) domain, you have a better chance of receiving higher placement for queries that match the affiliate product description. On the flip side, if you have a brand-new website that has no trust with Google (Page Rank), you’re not going to get very far using only significantly duplicate content.

    Bottom line: if you have a brand-new website, and especially if you’re using a cookie-cutter affiliate website that is replicated all over the internet, or just basing your website on affiliate product descriptions, you’re facing an almost insurmountable challenge to get good search engine rankings and ultimately traffic. The best way to make money and get traffic and better rankings, as I’ve found anyway, is to limit the use of ready-made websites and generic product descriptions and instead add affiliate links into unique, but relevant content on your own website. Personally, I use WordPress blogs for my niche marketing websites, and they work wonderfully. I have duplicate content for some Amazon products, but I add a lot of unique content that allows me to grab search engine traffic and then I can direct interested visitors to my affiliate link.

    If you have a high page-rank website that is well trusted and loved by Google, you probably can get away with slapping up a bunch of duplicate content and maybe do ok (however, Google recently changed how they rank pages for long-tail keywords… so who knows at this point — search for ‘Google may day update’ for more info on that), but you’re not likely in that scenario. If you want the best chance at success, though, you’re going to need unique content on your site, and a lot of it.

    – Disclaimer –
    Some of what I said above is over-simplified and may not be well explained. It should, however, give you some insight into how duplicate content can affect you, and the all-around problems arising out of relying only on duplicate content to compete in search engines.

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