If, as I believe, search engines such as Google are punishing those pages that contain affiliate links, then what can we do to protect these web pages? I have already shown how one of my own sites lost page rank on those pages that contained affiliate links, whereas those pages without the affiliate links gained a better ranking.

So what do we do? Well, it is possible that the old rel=”nofollow” tag added into the links could stop the search engines from following the links, but I do not think that is enough. More about that in the last part of the series.

The best way seems to be a redirect from a page on your own website. This means that not only are all of your links pointing internally, but you can place that redirect file into a folder which is blocked from search engines by a robots.txt file. This way, the search engines will never know that the link on your page is pointing to an affiliate site.

Unfortunately, yes it does seem a bit dishonest. But is it worth taking the risk of lowering page rank across the site just so that you can fit in some advertising in the side bar?

In the last part of the series we will look at what could be the full reasoning behind such a move from the search engines.

Written by Keith Lunt, owner of http://www.janric.co.uk. If you missed any of the part of this series you can catch up with them on the blog.

                          

I was only asked to start building this website on Thursday afternoon, so it was a bit of a mad rush. The URL was registered later that afternoon, the first pages put up during the afternoon and the majority of the site built as the text arrived on Monday.

And as you can see from the screen print (click on it to expand it), it may only be Wednesday morning now, but it is 5th on Google when searched for by name.

OK, you would expect that, but this time 6 days ago I’d never even heard of the company. We’ve got the site built and listed in Google in that time. Over the next couple of weeks I’m hoping that it might just climb above one or both of those directories that are currently in top spot. Plus, with a change to the pages that I have just put in place having seen the search engine results, the listing should stand out as the business’ own website and the changes should help raise it up the listings.

So hopefully we have done the trick. Quite an ask, but a new website from scratch and 7 out of its 11 pages listed in Google. Who says new sites can’t get onto Google quickly? They can – if you know what you are doing.

                          

I have experienced the MSN search engine, or Bing as it now is called, being a little slower to update. But I was sure that Google would be listing the site on time, it has worked so many times in the past. Usually there is a Google visit Thursday or Friday night to Janric, which is followed by a visit to the new site over the weekend and a listing appears Monday night, as if by magic.

A couple of times I have seen this delayed, by up to a week. Usually when a large page rank update is just around the corner. Maybe it is a sign. Or maybe it is just Google being Google and going at a different rate to what I have seen it do in the past. I suppose there is no reason why it has to go to the same schedule forever. There is not a contract there that says it has to!

So now I wait. No joyous email that the site is on Google and everyone who hears the local radio station’s advert calendar and Callow’s advert today and then searches for them on Google will in fact find a business directory listing, not the new website we have worked so hard to get live. Every page of it is there and ready to go. Just no search engines register that it exists and they are not sending visitors to out lovely new site.

Shame. Maybe tomorrow.

                          

I was told that just a home page with a banner across it saying website coming this week was enough, so not really that much work?

No problem! I’ll easy do it…

Until I asked why Tuesday. The simple answer was because that’s when the customer’s advert is being played all day on the local radio station and they want to include the website address in the advert.

That through a whole load of different problems into the equation. Suddenly we’re not just talking about a little over 2 working days or 4 elapsed days to get a home page up. Everyone else, being print designers, had missed a vital element.

An awful lot of people when given a website address will not type it straight into the address bar, they will type it into Google or their favourite search engines and use that to look for it. I’ve had no end of trouble passing sample websites to people for them to look at and then realising that they cannot find the website. I can tell them to type it into the address bar, but they keep insisting on searching Google. It can take a lot of convincing.

It is quite understandable. Many people know enough to get around the internet, but not everything. And in some ways searching for the website on a search engine can be an extra security. If the website is known to be dangerous, the search engine might flag it.

But this doesn’t help when you only have 4 and a bit days to get a website live. You have to appreciate that a lot of the people hearing the advert are going to search for the website’s name, or even the business name, instead of typing it.

So we’re on count down. Can we go from zero to hero, or at least listed on major search engines, in a few days? It is possible and I’ve done it before. First plan was to get the domain name registered and a home page published. In fact, we managed about half the site yesterday.

Next step was to get the site linked in to from a couple of other websites. My own website and one of the others I do website design for were used. Quick and easy to do them. Now it is a waiting game.

Hopefully, Google will trot along tonight and see the link to the new site and over the weekend will also visit the new site.  If we’re very lucky, this will be just in time for Google to update it’s index on Monday night and the new site should appear on Tuesday morning.

Just in time… All we need now is the remainder of the text.