Help me with a serious Google problem!

[befuddle]

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My blog post is here, written before I spotted this active thread. In the post you can see I am doing my bit to help by linking to the merchants site.

There's a screen grab showing that my own site is the second result in the organic listings. Not a bad ranking if I don't say so myself.

[D-Mac]

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

That link is very interesting as it raises the question as to whether befuddle's links are ranked higher than the merchant would have achieved without this bug? In other words, are they potentially getting a traffic boost as a result of this?

[Marc Gear]

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.

I just spoke to the merchant regarding the email they sent you and explained that the information their SEO company provided was inaccurate, that there was nothing malicious you had done and very little that you could do to your site to prevent Google from making this mistake anyway. I explained that we had made a change to our robots.txt which should take effect when Google got round to re-indexing.

[cyberbird1]

I'd be most interested in having a look at this more closely as I might be able to help. Could somebody pm me details of the sites and search term.

[Qui Gon Jinn]

Let me expand this further to really cloud the issue.

For merchant as I understand has ppc restrictions, we have a webgains affiliate as top sponsored listings.

We have Ebay & Ask bidding on the merchants url, filtering off traffic.

On top of this we have an affiliate of another network, bidding on the brands url to push traffic to a different merchant.

This one seems a bit of a mess.

More importantly, are the commissions still reversed? If so that is disgusting. Well enough of us have blogs we could easily have the merchants name & url as the title tag and rank fairly well. What will be wrong in principle if Webgains & not the merchant reimburses the affiliate, when it should be the merchant ... period.

This will set a precedence if not in favour of the affliate, Pandora's box opens and affiliates faith in networks will diminish with it, affiliates are getting squeezed enough on ppc, now seo .. no way

[Keith]

I have been watching this thread with interest and quite frankly I am appalled

One thing I can't understand is why the affiliate would get the commissions reversed, at the end of the day he is not at fault, if anyone is at fault it is the network for having the wrong kind of redirect on the link, therefore if it is felt that the commissions have to be reversed Webgains should shoulder all blame still be paying the affiliate what he earned.

On the other hand if the affiliate link had not been at number one in google serps who could say what exactly would have been in that position and would the merchant have actually got the sales or would the customers have ended up elsewhere? The very fact that that link had been crawled by google probably meant that the merchant ended up getting sales that they may not have had otherwise, so this affiliates activity even though it was unintentional actually created those sales therefore there is no conceivable reason why he shouldn't be rewarded for them and no reason at all why the merchant shouldn't pay for them.

[D-Mac]

I feel like a lone voice on this matter, but I feel someone has to voice this side of the argument.

This will set a precedence if not in favour of the affliate, Pandora's box opens and affiliates faith in networks will diminish with it, affiliates are getting squeezed enough on ppc, now seo .. no way

I can't see how this can be defined as affiliates being squeezed on SEO. It's not a matter of SEO, it's just a bug! Befuddle has done well to rank his voucher site as well as he has, all credit to him. But he didn't expect this matter to arise anymore than Bedstar or Webgains did. If Bedstar want to make a goodwill payment to Befuddle then good, but I don't believe they should be forced to, either by contractual obligation or through affiliate pressure.

If a precedent is set in favour of the affiliate on this matter then it is a bad day for affiliate marketing. Ultimately merchants are our clients too and we musn't lose sight of that. If we're perceived to exploit technical loopholes (whether or not it's actually the case, as it is the perception that counts) then merchants will lose faith and networks may start to work more exclusively with small groups of 'trusted' affiliates on PPC & SEO in an effort to restore credibility with their clients. Maybe I'm being melodramatic, I don't know. Affiliate marketing is evolving fast, but one thing is for sure: We need to keep the merchants on board. We musn't lose their trust.

One last point. Several people have criticised Bedstar's SEO company, perhaps for good reason. However, as affiliates do we not rely on merchants to be a bit crap at SEO in order for us to be able to out rank them and send them some decent traffic? If the merchant was superb at SEO their need for an affiliate programme would be diminished.

For the record I am an SEO and PPC affiliate and have operated previously as a merchant.

[Marc Gear]

affiliates are getting squeezed enough on ppc, now seo .. no way

Paul,

Affiliates are not being sqeezed on SEO. The concern here was about what had caused the google results to change, which turns out to be a problem with the way google indexes websites, and nothing to do with affiliates out-SEOing merchant websites.

As a moderator of this forum I would have hoped that you would help this thread stay on topic, rather than derail it with the Ebay/Ask/PPC issue which you have continually raised throughout this thread and which has nothing to do with the discussion.

[Marc Gear]

On the other hand if the affiliate link had not been at number one in google serps who could say what exactly would have been in that position and would the merchant have actually got the sales or would the customers have ended up elsewhere?

Kieth,

It is the merchant content which is #1 in the google SERPs, not the affiliate site, due to a problem with googles indexing the site got indexed as track.webgains.com rather than the merchant site. I fail to see how this occurence is Webgains responsibility (We do not run the Google search engine nor are we responsible for its content).. as a network, we are obviously interested in resolving this for the merchant as quickly as possible while protecting all parties interests.

I would add that we are not providing the "wrong sort of redirect for the link". If anyone does have any questions surrounding why we use a 302 rather than a 301 (or any other 30x response code) then I'm happy to go into details, but I think this thread is better left without going into details of the http protocol.

[cyberbird1]

Marc,

Are bedstar.co.uk saying that they previously ranked highly for the search phrases in question? Do they feel as though their listing has been replaced by exactly the same one (title & description) in the same position (more or less) by the listing with the webgains url?

Do you know if they (bedstar.co.uk) have made any changes to their site recently? Did their SEO company work on it recently or was their work some time ago?

[aaclapham]

On the other hand if the affiliate link had not been at number one in google serps who could say what exactly would have been in that position and would the merchant have actually got the sales or would the customers have ended up elsewhere?

It could have been far worse for the Merchant, least they have been getting sales.

I think the affiliate should get the commission.

[Keith]

It is the merchant content which is #1 in the google SERPs, not the affiliate site,

Mrac

I'm not saying it isn't the merchant content, what I am saying is that if that link wasn't there it would not necessarily mean that the merchant would be there, one of the searches I did the had the link showing number 1 on the full index had neither the link or the merchant at no 1 on the UK index in fact it was a review site with some not very good reviews who would have got the sale then?

I fail to see how this occurence is Webgains responsibility

I'm not saying it is Webgains responsibility that's why I ended by saying that the merchant should be paying for the sales.

However if Webgains let the merchant get away with these reversals then it is Webgains responsibility.

[Qui Gon Jinn]

What is encouraging is that the network came to the forum to open up the debate where some others would have not, so let's encourage them, like comments above to take the right course of action.

[cyberbird1]

Keith makes a valid point above.

If you search the UK only then befuddle's site is no. 1. The site with the affiliate link on.

The bedstar.co.uk page that the link points to is nowhere to be seen.

I'd like to know how new this landing page is. Has it really been replaced or is Google's first encounter with the page via befuddle's link?

These are important factors in deciding whether befuddle should keep the commission or not.

[drivetowin]

Clearly if this is to move forward there needs to be communication between Bedstar, Webgains and Befuddle and agreement reached on the future.

What I think is non-negotiable though is that Befuddle should be paid all commissions up until the point that he was notified of the problem regardless of what is agreed going forward.

To unilaterally reverse the commissions as the merchant has done is clearly breach of contract. Those commissions should be reinstated forthwith and if I were Befuddle I would insist on that being done before entering into any negotiation about how to resolve the problem. There seems to be an increasing tendency for merchants to take action retrospectively and I feel it is important that we all as an industry say this is 100% unacceptable. I'm sure if I bought a bed from Bedstar, noticed some damage on it 5 years after I bought it and then went back to them and said "Oi, I want all my money back" they would say tough and rightly so. Reaching agreement once a problem has been identified is one thing, backdating that to when you should have identified it is another one altogether.

Marc - I don't think you can claim Webgains have no responsibility for this - if you've found a solution now then that solution should have been in place prior to this happening. I'm not pointing the finger as I know how hard you work and I fully recognise that hindsight is an exact science but at the same time I fell Webgains must shoulder some of the responsibility.

Dave - I agree with you up to a point but equally I think it is important that affiliates don't become the weak link in the chain. We need to be professional, but being professional does not mean not defending your corner.

Paul - I don't think derailing this thread by talking about ppc from eBay does anything to help resolve the core issue here.