Giving affiliates templates

[simoneaton]

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What are your guys thought from the merchant and affiliate side in allowing affiliates to access templates?

One of my clients is allowing affiliates to download sports betting portals.

Have other merchants done this in the past? And does this affect on the overall SEO listing of theirs and other sites?

This is an interesting dilemma as I see some affiliates really good a driving traffic but have terrible sites, and that is why we implemented.

I really will value your feedback as I want to know am I causing more damage than good. The general reaction to the templates from the affiliates has been great and the player signups have doubled, so it must be working to a degree.

Please note the client has been around 7 years and had an affiliate program since 1998, and yes over the last two weeks signups were up through affiliates. The affiliate site was rebranded and launched a month ago.

Thoughts plz.

[Supercod]

Make your own minds up people, just research and look into everything. Person posting and the posts they have made to date, whois record of the domain name for the site they are promoting, anyway you get the drift, good luck with this Simon. Can I ask one thing, treat the board with respect and you will get good things but treat the people hear like mindless get rich quick folk and you get nothing.

Your going to ask why I am being negative here, well it was your top 5 Christmas post that kind of upset me actually.. Also you say "player signups have doubled" yet site been live about 2 months so that wouldn't be a surprise, I am just looking out for fellow board members, because we let you post here it can make people reading think we approve of what you do and this is not always the case but I am sure in time you will prove me wrong and you get to be one of the good guys on the board we come to respect.

[simoneaton]

Supercod,

Out of general courtesy to your post the last post has been edited not to contain the name of the client as I am looking for real feedback on this.

Also why did my five Christmas items upset you, because they were not all toy related?

[Supercod]

Originally posted by simoneaton
Also why did my five Christmas items upset you, because they were not all toy related?

No it upset me because I feel your posting is only to server one interest, to push online gambling as the number one source of income and you happen to be involved in some.

I never heard from any affiliate ever that Christmas is the hot time for pushing online gambling, but I might be missing out here. It could be for all I know.

Anyway what can I say, I just like to hear some balanced views and I am afraid to me your painting a picture that was not at all true in my eyes and I have said my bit. If I am wrong fine I am wrong, but if you can post your views, so I can post mine. It's nothing personal honest, it's simply we have had people in the past that simply think the way to get on in this forum is to post what they like and hope some people bite. I respect your removal of the link to the site in question and this will lend no end of credibility to what your asking in your question, it goes from being a sharp attempt at getting a few more affiliates to a genuine question by doing so.

[CrazyGuy]

In the interests of giving you the benefit of the doubt and a genuine reply to your question ...

I have sites I have created from scratch, and sites that are my template containing substantially "canned" content, and merchant-supplied template sites.

While I can't distinguish between the results, SE effectiveness, etc of the first two types, my experience is that complete merchant templates perform badly.

... but that's because I mainly rely on free SE traffic.

I think the duplicate content filter in the SEs is quite broad, in that you can publish an article (say) 20 times with different navigation etc around it and they will all get listed ... but if the page is 100% or maybe 99% (different logo) the same, it will be penalized - as in: the first page crawled will be listed, the rest won't. My understanding however is that there's no penalty above being not listed.

On the other hand, if you have other ways of driving traffic to a site, a properly designed merchant template (where proper = not just nice to look at) will outperform a badly designed site. So, in an area using PPC, popups etc, I'm think affiliates probably benefit from a nice template