Help me with a serious Google problem!

[Mogga]

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If the affiliate is in the innocent party in all this (which is sounds like this is the case) so they shouldn't be penalised.

If google's messed up then the merchant can contact them and ask nicely... got to be worth a try

[D-Mac]

If the affiliate is in the innocent party in all this (which is sounds like this is the case) so they shouldn't be penalised.

If google's messed up then the merchant can contact them and ask nicely... got to be worth a try

They're not really being penalised though. It's a bit like finding a £50 note in the street and then someone turning round and saying, sorry, I just dropped that.

lol, Google paying up, that'll be the day.

Kier has correctly pointed out that it was me who mentioned 0%, not him.

[Mogga]

They're not really being penalised though. It's a bit like finding a £50 note in the street and then someone turning round and saying, sorry, I just dropped that.

lol, Google paying up, that'll be the day.

Kier has correctly pointed out that it was me who mentioned 0%, not him.

I didn't say pay up I meant put the merchant back where it used to be...

whoever gets the top listing in google is there and gets the sale, whether it's the merchant, the affiliate or a competition. Unfortunately we don't always agree with which site is at the top of google's ranking but this is the position google is in - it's one of extreme power.

Being withheld commision is wrong if it's because google's ranked you where the merchant doesn't think you should be.

[DavidCartlidge]

Kier, is the 'snippet' from the merchant site, but the links through to the affiliate?

Or is the snippet and the links for the affiliate?

If it is the latter, have the merchants URLs gone from the SERPs?

If they have, seems like the affiliates website is seen as the original source of information about the merchants products. If this is the case perhaps the merchant should review their SEO efforts, especially with regard to allowing affiliates to use identical content to their own website.

[D-Mac]

Being withheld commision is wrong if it's because google's ranked you where the merchant doesn't think you should be.

Yes, I 100% agree, but this isn't a case of an affiliate outranking the merchant. This is about a bug in Google's index. It's not an algo issue.

Ultimately people's views are going to based on whether you should take Google's results as you see them, warts and all, or whether there are, very occasionaly, times when common sense says you should overide what you see.

It's a bit like buying a telly for 50p on Argos coz they put they decimal point in the wrong place.

[Mogga]

Yes, I 100% agree, but this isn't a case of an affiliate outranking the merchant. This is about a bug in Google's index. It's not an algo issue.

Ultimately people's views are going to based on whether you should take Google's results as you see them, warts and all, or whether there are, very occasionaly, times when common sense says you should overide what you see.

It's a bit like buying a telly for 50p on Argos coz they put they decimal point in the wrong place.

There've always been bugs in google.

It's nothing like the decimal point being wrong.
You'd know then it wasn't a genuine offer.

Google can put whoever where ever it wants. That's how it works. [1]
If you want a sanitised friendly version write your own search engine and then get a zillion people to use it.

[1] Obviously within the dictates of US law.

[Hero]

let's not get carried away here with accusations about penalising the affiliate or the merchant or anyone else. This is a puzzling situation as to why Google has decided to replace the merchant's natural links with affiliate tracking links and what Google or the merchant or the affiliate or the network can do to rectify this.
There would have been NO questions raised if it was the affiliate's site ranking higher than the merchant's. Mr Merchant, sorry, but your SEO is crap. But in this case, it's links, not an actual site. Not a sponsored link, where the advertising intention is clear. So obviously the question will be raised: would these commissions be generated for the affiliate had this not happened? Should the affiliate get the commission? It's only fair to wonder about these. Wonder, not judge.
We are here to protect everyone's interest, not blindly take the side of the merchant or the affiliate. We're still investigating this situation.

thanks

[cyberbird1]

This is a well known problem with Google. It's a problem with their duplicate filtering. Out of all the copies of the page that's ranking Google has to decide which once to list. I've seen Google Guy comment on this and they list the most authoritive version. A large part of this decision is based on the PR of the page, so when a redirect comes from a high PR page there is an issue.

A good SEO company should know about this problem.

If you do a search with duplicate filtering turned off you should see the page that appears to have been replaced.

One possible solution would be to have the duplicate page removed from Google using the automated removal process. You can cloak the requests for this url so that the spider that comes from Google to check that the page needs removing is served different content than other requests on this url.

Please check that my proposed solution will work before putting it into practice.

[drivetowin]

Does the merchant page still appear in Google, i.e. is it just that this link is appearing above their entry, or is the merchant page not appearing at all?

Just a thought but could the merchant have done anything on the SEO of their page to get themselves a Google penalty?

[Marc Gear]

Hi,

Looks like this thread needs a bit of technical explanation about what has happened, in order to clarify things.

* Googlebot finds and indexes the affiliates page
* Googlebot finds a link to track.webgains.com and 'clicks' on it, and recieves a http 302 response code which indicates that the content has been temporarily moved
* It then indexes the content it finds on the redirect, and adds some or all of the links on the referring page to a queue of pages to be indexed
* Some other googlebot goes through this queue, indexing the pages in it - one/alll of them is a track.webgains.com link
* This googlebot recieves a 302, which it interprets as the merchant site being the temporary location for the content on it. It stores the merchants page content, against the track.webgains.com link, rather than the target URL
* This googlebot adds the merchant content as a brand new page, against the affiliate url it just indexed (because track.webgains.com is what it thinks is the permanent home for the content - according to the header)
* Now if the googlebot hits up the merchant site directly, it sees dupe content, and so doesn't add the merchant site to the index.

This is a search engine bug, which can happen with any search engine, and which they have more or less fixed, but it still happens occasionally.

The alternative is to use a 301 (permanent) redirect, however that has the unwanted effect of search engines / proxys etc caching the location of content as being the new home for the content and prevents Webagins or the merchant from changing the default target URL for the click (to add a querystring param or change the target url in any way)

The only alternative is to stop Google from indexing our click script (click.html) using a robots.txt file which we have done, and this should make the problem go away once google reindexes.

Everyone should be aware that this is a search engine problem, its not a deliberate 'hijack' by the affiliate, nor is it a mistake by Webgains. This is something that google have more-or-less fixed and it is a problem with search engine indexing procedure.

[cyberbird1]

Hi Marc,

Are you sure about the merchant site not being in google's index?

I'm going back a year or two but my understanding is that Google very rarely recreates a brand new index. The job is just too big. It adds pages and updates them in an ongoing process.

If that's the case the merchants page is probably in the index along with other duplicates and it's just the search process that lists 1 copy of the page.

I could be wrong but you used to be able to verify this by doing a search with duplicate filtering turned off.

[befuddle]

The commissions HAVE been reversed. No matter how we got here. This just seems TOTALLY wrong

And I don't even think "wrong" is the right word.

I've spoke to Kier on the phone and Webgains are going to email BedStar on my behalf as I'm not going to amend my robots.txt file. A while back another merchant asked if I could stop getting my pages spidered as I was performing too well. If I did that I wouldn't have a business.

The merchant seriously needs to look at their SEO company, who I believe to be StickyEyes. For a start, "BedStar" doesn't even feature in the page title.

They are also quick to accuse me of doing something unethical. Fortunately I work closely with Webgains and they quickly knew nothing underhand was going on.

[Marc Gear]

Hi Marc,
Are you sure about the merchant site not being in google's index?

I'm going back a year or two but my understanding is that Google very rarely recreates a brand new index. The job is just too big. It adds pages and updates them in an ongoing process.

If that's the case the merchants page is probably in the index along with other duplicates and it's just the search process that lists 1 copy of the page.

I could be wrong but you used to be able to verify this by doing a search with duplicate filtering turned off.

&filter=0 gets rid of duplicate results, but it has no effect on the searches in question - the merchant site does not appear. The merchant site is still in the google index, but not ranked as highly as the track.webgains.com result.

I believe that the dupe filter only filters out similar content on different URLs (not necessarilly domains)

[drivetowin]

That the commissions have been reversed when you have done nothing wrong is outrageous. Hopefully Webgains will get this situation put right.

Having read Marc's explanation I would apportion responsibility for this as 80% Google, 20% Webgains, 0% affiliate (ignoring the merchant's poor SEO in the first place).

[bazza99]

Just stepping in here, I can see that befuddle's link does not appear in place of the merchants URL on all searches within Google by any means.

In fact, it only appears on searches where the merchant (or their SEO 'experts') appear to have been attempting to optimise for particular keywords - 'online beds superstore' one such example:
"online beds superstore" - Google Search

I wonder whether the SEO company have triggered a penalty here. The merchants first step should be to go back to them and ask what exactly they've been doing. Think that's the likely cause of the problem.