Hello,
I have a website out and want to try my luck as an affiliate with a few ecommerce websites. I'm wondering whether it's possible to post a few files to my site with meta tag descriptions of products and other details, so that Google and Yahoo will notice these tags and link to my pages. What will happen then is I will redirect the user to the ecommerce site and hopefully collect an amount of money for the referral.
My site is already listed as a PR 3 but it gets very little traffic. I'm not sure how I got a PR 3 at all. I think it's because I have a lot of links to it, and it's been around for about 3 years now. Anyway, instead of going through the effort of improving the site to get visitors, I thought of this idea of just posting files with redirects.
Would Google frown on this as being a form of cheating? Or will they approve, since the user does get what they asked for, even though they are being redirected? Are other people trying this approach? And probably most importantly, will Google even notice at all?
Thanks for any advice,
Peter 
Christian_SEO posted this at 03:20 — 23rd August 2004.
They have: 470 posts
Joined: Mar 2001
Good question, but the question back to you is why would Google send you traffic when they can send the traffic directly to the ecommerce site?
And yes, re-directs are "cheating".
The best way to go is to provide what people are looking for, which is information on whatever topic your site is about. The more good content you provide, the more traffic you should get. Of course, you will want to research the keyword phrases to make sure you are using the right things, and optimize your site as well as possible.
Then you can have affiliate links on your site and people are interested, they will click and you may get something out of it.
Affiliate marketing seems like and easy way to make money, but the truth is it's quite a bit of work for most people. I would so some more research on the subject, try to find out some forums where affiliates hang out and trade information.
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Dirty_Dawg posted this at 21:08 — 26th August 2004.
He has: 64 posts
Joined: Aug 2004
Christian is correct both about re-directs and affiliate marketing.
I own a search engine and like most we have a "spider" when the spider hits the site and picks up the re-direct the site is rejected, and it never makes it to our human review process that gives it an even closer look.
That brings up another point.. most affiliate links are redirects, which make it very difficult to list them with a search enigne. We have a few only because we "force feed" them to override our spider.
To pick up additional traffic network linking will help, and it increases your position with many of the search engines.. we lose about 90% of our traffic count because we give it to our content providers as part of our agreement. It gives them better positioning in the ranking services, and they are paying us.. so there is a trade of.. we take the money over the ranking.... LOL
Good Luck and I hope my comments help
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peterswan posted this at 16:41 — 28th August 2004.
They have: 4 posts
Joined: Aug 2004
Thanks for the comments all.
I went ahead and posted the file for the fun of it, but I doubt if I'll get any business.
Shortly I'll be looking in to starting a content driven site that generates interest, and hopefully be able to put up some relevant ad banners or links to other sites.
Thanks again for the input,
Peter