Now you discover the truth of how not all clicks go to the #1 spot. Add to that the simple realisation that anyone searching for 'bedstar' already knows about the merchant so when they see a whole lot of affiliate links in the top results they will get around to trying either bedstar.com or bedstar.co.uk to get to where they want to go - or click on the ppc ad if it is being displayed.Originally Posted by befuddle
Every time the webgains URL is displayed in the SERPs, the browser tries to set a cookie even without having to click on the link. As I am asked to accept 2 cookies, and I do reject them, it is impossible to know if these are the webgains cookies and that is inflating your figures or the google-analytics cookie from bedstar.
If I click on the webgains URL to go to bedstar, I also get asked to allow an easysurfer cookie.
What is an even bigger concern is that even though I went through an affiliate URL, on the top of the header I am offered a 'sales & enquiries' phone number. Naughty.
Fair enough. It's those people that do use the brand name in the searches, that I am targetting, as Google will generally send them direct to the correct page on my site rather than my home page, increasing my conversions.
Hi there, the offending redirect is hosted on webgains.com, why not simply log in to your Google Webmaster console and remove the specifc URL (and for that many any others that have been indexed)? Problem solved!
Of coure the merchant then might have no natrual listings at all...
If you had been reading this thread, you would know that there are no offending redirects hosted anywhere. Neither webgains nor affiliatewindow nor whoever is going to be there tomorrow.
If you had ever tried getting a page removed from Google then you would know what a waste of time that is.
It's worked on the many occasions that I've done it. Admittedly the last time was about a year ago.
It is not a specific url, or even one url from the same domain. Firstly, the Webgains link present included my tracking parameters; then another affiliates; then an Affiliate Window url appeared; before it was then back to the second Webgains one.
Also, Google.co.uk (pages from the UK) searches no longer includes the issue. Though, it also no longer includes the BedStar home page.
Sorry, I should have been more awake and not just assumed that bedstar where using visitor logging other than google-analytics. When I looked at their source code, I did see what looked like another hit logger script being called, although through a different domain name and assumed that was the source of the extra cookie request.
The last couple of weeks I have been helping a webmaster whose site suddenly disappeared from google. As we eliminate a few proxies, so the site comes back only to drop again a few days later as the next proxy cache ranks in the place of his site.
Tonight I discovered that easysurfer.com is one of the proxies which is attacking him.
How easysurfer have got into the middle of all this is anyone's guess, even more confusing as they did not show as being around with all the redirects, but that cookie request on route to bedstar.co.uk had to come from somewhere.
Being cached through a proxy is death to any site.
The solution is simple. Block the IP address of easysurfer.com, preferably at router level.
Once you have done that, use a browser which has the google toolbar enabled, and visit easysurfer.com and put bedstar.co.uk into the search box. If the block has worked, you should not be able to see the bedstar.co.uk site in the window and should receive an error message.
The google toolbar will report back to google that the bedstar site content is no longer hosted on easysurfer.com and 'should' return the content to the correct URLs within about 48 hours.
This is #2 of the possible causes of the problem that bedstar has been having. The next 98 should keep their SEO consultants in business for a little while. Happy hunting. It does help knowing where to look.
At this stage, my guess is that webgains are beginning to feel a little better about themselves.
Theres a piece which is relevant on the Google Webmasters Blog today:
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog
How we help users and webmasters with duplicate content
We've designed algorithms to help prevent duplicate content from negatively affecting webmasters and the user experience.
1. When we detect duplicate content, such as through variations caused by URL parameters, we group the duplicate URLs into one cluster.
2. We select what we think is the "best" URL to represent the cluster in search results.
3. We then consolidate properties of the URLs in the cluster, such as link popularity, to the representative URL.
Consolidating properties from duplicates into one representative URL often provides users with more accurate search results.
Not sure what 3 means.
Anybody help me on that.
Forgetting bugs for the moment...
If this merchant were to be eliminated by google tomorrow could he/she survive?
This whole thread feels like a merchant crisis thread. Are all the eggs in the google basket here?
Question: Is every ones eggs all in the google basket?
It appears that my tracking code is now back in the results today.
Looks like that is where all the PR goes.
So, your original content does well in the SERPs and you build up some good links to it, spreading the PR around your site to benefit those pages you want to promote.
Someone comes along and clones your page. They already have a high PR and lots of links so the cloning site as seen as a better site than yours.
Your nice original page gets penalised as being a duplicate. PR is wiped out so your whole site suffers. Not only do you loose your page but your site drops out of the SERPs.
The penalty goes further, whatever your 'duplicate' page ranked well for is now also a negative for your whole site and even if you had other pages that were listed in the same cluster in the SERPs for that term, now you won't find your site anywhere for those terms. Even if they are on the page, the cache will not highlight them.
You may also see this effect referred to as a ghost - the ghost gets the ranking and the original disappears. It often happens if a site changes hosting and the old hosting does not give the correct response when the bot comes crawling - the content on the new IP is seen as the clone and the PR stays with the old IP address.
tpb - Google may have put that on their blog today but it is one of the oldest black hat means of destroying a site. Now that proxies, web2 and rss feeds make cloning so much easier, this little gremlin must be annoying more people. Google does not care about who the author is, only cares at putting a least one copy of good content near the top of the SERPs.
If the only search engine any business ranks well in is in Google then they have a very weak SEO consultant.
The only search engine traffic that affects my results is Yahoo. When that traffic is down, so is my revenue. I can have Google sending me 10 times the traffic of Yahoo and I hardly notice any increase. I often have Google banned from my [personal] sites and don't see any meaningful change in their overall profitability.
I aim for 60% Yahoo, 30% MSN and the balance Google and Ask with AOL sometimes showing if Google is ranking me well.
It is a pity that clients are only happy when they have 80% Google traffic and the rest they hardly seem to mention. One client had better conversion on Yahoo and MSN visitors than their adwords conversion - their response was to increase the number of adwords campaigns. Greatest happiness came when both the adwords and natural results had them in the top #3 on Google. The #1s on Yahoo and MSN never got a mention.
Another contact started to optimise his pages for Yahoo and MSN and was pleased to notice that even though their numbers were low compared with the Google traffic, they typically visited twice the average number of pages - and gave higher revenue per visitor.
I think I understand now. Thanks moredial.
I wonder if they're only referring to 100% duplicates though? That would mean you might lose your page but your site would actually get more PR becuase the "internal" links on the copied page would have to point to your site for it to be a 100% duplicate (if fully qualified hyperlinks are used).
Of course if they do the same consolidation of properties for near duplicates you could end up having some of your PR stolen if the links on the copied page don't point to your site. Perhaps this is an argument for using fully qualified hyperlinks to pages on your own site?
There's also a possible upside if somebody copies your content if your own page is deemed the "best url" by Google. All the link popularity, PR etc for the pages that are a copy of yours will be consolidated to your page.
That's the position I'm in now and it means I can now party in Hong Kong instead of Hartlepool. With more volume of traffic, it's more sales.
I've had months when Google doesn't promote my site at any high level and all I can see is Yahoo and MSN results in the log files.
And it's depressing as Yahoo only seem to spider pages once a month at best.
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