Help me with a serious Google problem!

[drivetowin]

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Search for site:bedstar.co.uk on live.com and yahoo.com and neither of them have any problem putting bedstar's home page at the top of the results.
What more proof do you need that neither networks nor merchant has caused this issue.

Sorry, but that doesn't prove anything at all - everyone knows that each search engine has it's own way of working - just because two show the 'correct' url and one doesn't is no indicator of where the fault lies - the site may be classed as 'black hat' by one and 'white hat ' by the other two or MSN and Yahoo may simply have not crawled the Bedstar site for a while. To compare Google results with MSN and Yahoo is comparing Apples with Pears with Raspberries.

[hpops]

Think I've been misconstrued here - or just quoted oddly - anyway to add weight if nothing else, neither the publisher, advertiser, agency or network are to blame.
Google is, but impossible to challenge
The industry therefore has to tackle it collectively and there is no chance that this only effects one merchant.

[Keith]

Searching on one term (brand name) there is now an Affiliate Window link in the mix

[moredial]

Sorry, but that doesn't prove anything at all - everyone knows that each search engine has it's own way of working - just because two show the 'correct' url and one doesn't is no indicator of where the fault lies - the site may be classed as 'black hat' by one and 'white hat ' by the other two or MSN and Yahoo may simply have not crawled the Bedstar site for a while. To compare Google results with MSN and Yahoo is comparing Apples with Pears with Raspberries.

If you had looked at the cache you would see that both Yahoo and MSN point to the new home page.

The argument I was offering was to support the theory that none of the sites mentioned are the cause of Google's inability to follow instructions. Compared with the apples offered by the other search engines, Google is a glassy potato.

[Qui Gon Jinn]

well spotted Keith .. it's like pass the parcel

[moredial]

Think I've been misconstrued here - or just quoted oddly - anyway to add weight if nothing else, neither the publisher, advertiser, agency or network are to blame.
Google is, but impossible to challenge
The industry therefore has to tackle it collectively and there is no chance that this only effects one merchant.

Thank you for your support.

Google is not impossible to challenge. Bad search engines have been challenged (ignored) in the past and there is no reason to exempt one because it is the belle of the ball.

If every affiliate, network, merchant, agent in the UK ignored Google for just one week, would that help to get the issue noticed? Even one day if that is all you can afford. Try another search engine, become an explorer of other advertising media - they all still work at bringing in customers.

If we got the support of the USA affiliate marketers, also for just one week, would anyone take heed of the message?

This one gremlin has cost and is still costing a lot of businesses a lot of money. If it takes a collective action by just one industry within the business sector to say that enough is enough, then that can only be good for all businesses.

There is another gremlin which is also starting to cost businesses a lot of money and that is Google replacing domain URLs with a proxy clone's URLs. The difference is that it only takes a bit of work and a few days for a webmaster to recover from that gremlin. Against this gremlin, webmasters have no defence.

[Marc Gear]

Hi all,

These erroneous search results seem to be reducing in google. I'd like to think it was because of the change to the robots.txt file, but with these things you can never be 100% sure (there are greater forces at work).

This is not the end of the issue, we are going to continue to look at the best approach to this problem, and will endeavor to keep affiliates informed of what we're doing, and what we believe to be best practice. At the end of the day, this sort of occurrence jeopardises the revenue to the merchant, the network and all affiliates. Thank you to all who offered advise and their experience, and to everyone who contributed to the discussion.

One thing that has seems to have been overlooked in this thread is the fact that affiliates who were genuinely producing traffic for merchants through either websites promotion or PPC will not have been credited for any return traffic to those merchants through the SERPs. To me, this seems like the most important thing to protect, as the 'last referer' rule is not something that we want to start confusing.

Thanks again

[moredial]

These erroneous search results seem to be reducing in google. I'd like to think it was because of the change to the robots.txt file, but with these things you can never be 100% sure (there are greater forces at work).

Your robots.txt file still contains incorrect syntax. Just now it is not telling any bots what to do.

Another option is to move all affiliate URLs into a subdirectory so that all bots with be given the correct syntax, i.e. Disallow: /click/

Even better, use the "Deny from" in the htaccess on that directory to block the IP addresses of all the major bots.

Affiliates need to play their part too. Any redirect to the network URL is helping to cause the problem. 301 redirects are boosting the PR of the network's URLs.
Search engines do not follow javascript so hide the URL in javascript and help to stop this problem. If networks only offer links in javascript, this will go a long way to solve the problem.

One thing that has seems to have been overlooked in this thread is the fact that affiliates who were genuinely producing traffic for merchants through either websites promotion or PPC will not have been credited for any return traffic to those merchants through the SERPs. To me, this seems like the most important thing to protect, as the 'last referer' rule is not something that we want to start confusing.

Are you saying that if any buyer has clicked on the PPC ad that bedstars have been running that this will have over-written the tracking cookie? Or that there have been so many clicks on the webgains/awin tracking URL that affiliate IDs there are now sitting with all the cookies pointing to them?

Is affiliatewindow joining in this discussion?

[Fraser]

One thing that has seems to have been overlooked in this thread is the fact that affiliates who were genuinely producing traffic for merchants through either websites promotion or PPC will not have been credited for any return traffic to those merchants through the SERPs. To me, this seems like the most important thing to protect, as the 'last referer' rule is not something that we want to start confusing.

That's a really good point Marc. Definitely the most interesting thread in a long time

If networks only offer links in javascript, this will go a long way to solve the problem.

let's not start that again..... you might think it solves one problem but it causes a whole lot more.

[befuddle]

affiliates who were genuinely producing traffic for merchants through either websites promotion or PPC will not have been credited for any return traffic to those merchants through the SERPs.

Are other affiliates really losing out? If they were, then surely I would have picked up a weeks worth of cookies and would have seen at least 1 extra sale during this period?

I know the daily traffic that went through that tracking link and how many views of this post, so it really wouldn't surprise me at all if the vast majority of those visitors were affiliate marketeers from this forum and not bed buyers.

[cyberbird1]

Hi all,

One thing that has seems to have been overlooked in this thread is the fact that affiliates who were genuinely producing traffic for merchants through either websites promotion or PPC will not have been credited for any return traffic to those merchants through the SERPs. To me, this seems like the most important thing to protect, as the 'last referer' rule is not something that we want to start confusing.

Thanks again

Yes good point. Did that thought come to you when you saw an affiliate window url listed?

Just teasing

[tbp]

"Bedstar" search result still shows a webgains url for number 1 in the world results.

However, in the UK results, the bedstar site cannot be seen until page 3, where they get a mention for a link deep in their site. Bet they wished they'd kept the affiliate link now, as there own site doesn't appear, even for a direct search on their name!

[befuddle]

I have the top two spots in Google UK or the search term "bedstar"

[befuddle]

Here's a quick tip for the BedStar SEO team. If you want to feature in Google for the search term "Bedstar", place the word "Bedstar" in your home page title and meta description.

[cyberbird1]

You can't really blame the SEO team for not targetting the term bedstar. Hardly anyone searches for it. Also they should rank no. 1 just from anchor text in links and the domain name.

Yahoo estimates 169 searches a month for 'bedstar' but 4633 for 'leather bed'. These are usually overestimates.