Affiliate Merchants & Search Engine Manipulation Tactics

I’ve heard a lot of stories about how some high traffic affiliate sites have been kicked out of the programs they’re promoting, because they outrank the merchant site in the search engines and I think that stinks. Well, now it’s happened to me.

For the past 2 months, I’ve been getting phone calls from a New York based telephone number. Sometimes I’ve been getting these calls 4-5 times a day and when I pick up the phone, there’s no-one on the other end. Odd, and annoying. So finally, I blocked the number and the calls stopped.

Today, a letter showed up in my mailbox from a company I’m an affiliate of, stating that I’ve been kicked out of their affiliate program… because several pages of mine that link to their products are in the top 20 on Google for the same search terms used to find their products.

W. T. F. ???

A company ‘firing’ an affiliate because they do well in the search engines… for keywords and terms the company can’t even get into the top 100 for?

Ok, now I’m mad. I wasn’t trying to manipulate the search engines. In fact, I had forgotten about those pages… because the products weren’t selling anyway - probably because when someone clicked on the links on my pages the merchant site is so fucked up it’s not converting that traffic into buyers. The site is a nightmare since they changed it.

So today I downloaded the database (the site is run with wordpress), did a search and replace of any links leading to their affiliate program with another program and re-uploaded.

Problem solved, for me, but NOT for THEM.

On Monday, I’m scanning the letter I recieved from this company and sending it off to the Google gods along with a formal abuse report - stating that this company is strongarming affiliates and webmasters in an effort to manipulate the search results in their favor.

Over the weekend, I’m contacting some people I know who have been kicked out of this program and will try to get them on board as well.

This could be grounds for a lawsuit so I will not mention the name of the company or it’s site, but I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Google HQ when this fiasco comes to light.

Jesus: “Paul, You’ve been kicked out of XYZ affiliate program cuz after repeated demands to remove ABC.php page that ranks higher than ours for the same product name from google, you have not complied.”

Fuck you, XYZ.