Search Engines BAN affiliate links!

From the Desk of Eric Owens
VP of Business Development - NameStick.com


A question that I frequently hear from my clients is:
"Do I really need to have my own domain name to
get my distributor or affiliate link listed in the
Search Engines?"

The one word answer is 'YES.'. First, many search
engines are 'truncating' distributor & affiliate
links (reducing them to the basic link, which is
often the company website minus the your distributor
or affiliate code), or even worse...
search engines are banning affiliate links,
and blacklisting subdomains of the parent company
that contain certain obvious characters that
are not obviously part of the base site.

Second, a very common practice is for your visitors
to just 'cut off' or remove the affiliate code from
the end of your link and just go directly to the
parent company and 'bypass' your rightful commissions.


The parent company still gets the same number of
sales, but your commissions go untracked.

Fortunately, there is an easy way to overcome this.

Click Here


As a network marketing distributor and affiliate,
there are a number of reasons why having your
own domain name is a must:


1) When you have your own domain name, the address
of your web site will be of the form
http://www.EasyToRememberName.com.

On the other hand, if your website is just a company
replicated website on one of the free servers,
the address of your web site will be something like
http://affiliatesite.com/cgi-bin/12345/IMakeMoneyOffYou.htm

Which of these two sounds more professional?
Which of these two is smaller and is easier to remember?
Which of these two would you click on?


2) The only way to make money online is to build
up credibility with your prospects and customers.

Having your own domain name is the first step in
doing that. Your customers will feel more comfortable
buying whatever it is that you are selling if you
have your own domain name. It makes your customers
feel that they are dealing with a large,
established company, rather than with some
fly by night operator.


3) When you have your domain name, you can have
multiple email aliases of the form alias@yourcompany.com.

This allows you to assign different email aliases
to different functions, all of them pointing to
your actual email address. Hence, for example,
for questions related to the products and services
that you sell, you can have an email address like
sales@yourcompany.com. For questions related to the
newsletter that you publish, you can have an email
address like editor@yourcompany.com.
For comments/suggestions about your web site,
you can direct your customers to
feedback@yourcompany.com or webmaster@yourcompany.com.

Having different email addresses for different
functions not only makes it easier for you to
filter your email using your email client program
(Eudora Pro, Pegasus Mail, Outlook Express etc.),
but also gives your customers the impression that
yours is a large, established company with whom
it is safe to do business.


4) Many search engines give a lot of emphasis to
the home page of a particular domain.

So, other factors remaining the same, a home page
of a domain will often rank higher for a particular
keyword than any other page. When you submit your
long, obvious affiliate link, your index.html
page is the home page of your site, but not of
that domain. In these search engines, your site
will find it very difficult to make it to the
top 20 or top 30, let alone the top 10 for some
of the really competitive keywords. Just think of
the amount of traffic that you will lose if this
happens.


5) Many major search engines are now refusing
to spider the web sites that contain obvious
affiliate coding.

For instance, a link that includes these characters
backslashes, cgi-bin, and affiliate numbers or
usernames, would, until recently, have got the
infamous error message saying that too many pages
have been submitted from your site if you tried
to submit your site to AltaVista.

While AltaVista now says that 'your URL has been
submitted for processing' if you try to submit
your site, rest assured that it will not spider
any site obviously belonging to affiliate programs
any more - even if it says that your site has
been accepted. Can you afford that?


6) You will also find it very difficult to get an
affiliate link listed in a major directory like
Yahoo!. Although Yahoo! will never admit that it
won't add a commercial site which is hosted by an
affiliate program, in practice, it will be a
miracle if you can get your site listed by Yahoo!.
Listing your site with Yahoo! is difficult enough
even when you have your own domain. Don't make
your task more difficult than what it needs to be.


If you do not currently have a domain name to
promote your affiliate program, are you convinced
that you need one right now?

The small fee that you pay per year for your own
domain name is peanuts compared to the benefits
that you get. You can check out the availability
of domain names and register new domains at
Click Here


You can now also customize the Title, Keywords and
Description tags for your domain. This gives you
advanced search engine optimization for higher
search engine rankings. Almost all affiliate links
are NOT indexed by any of the major search engines.
NameStick Domains are.



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Eric Owens is the Vice President of Business Development
and Search Engine Specialist for NameStick.com.

Affiliates - In Under 7 Minutes You Can Explode Click
Throughs (And Profits) By 327% Or More Using This Easy
To Use Tool. Click Here
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