Understanding PR, Affiliate Content and Poor Google SERPs

Posted by SEO Dave on July 6th, 2007 at 03:52am

Reading the newsgroup alt.internet.search-engines and a post subject: PR confusion? caught my eye.

A poster to the NG has been having problems with an affiliate site http://www.review-a-gadget.com/ and he’s been given some poor quality advice.

I’m confused about PR again.

Not surprised you’ve got some really bad advice lately, been following your newsgroup threads, but I didn’t have the time to post, but it became too much to see another round of ignorance sending you again down the wrong path chasing SERPs I don’t think this site can gain!

Someone in another group told me about the importance of getting deep in links to my inner pages.

It’s debatable, a text link to any page of your site will help every page of the site, since PR flows through text links, including internal text links. So they all help with PR and rankings of EVERY page (assuming every page is linked via other internal pages, basically no orphan pages).

If you want a particular pages SERPs to rank well in Google then linking directly to it is better than linking to the home page since it will gain more link benefit/PR from a direct link.

If I get in links to my index page, shouldn’t that contribute to the pagerank of my inner content pages also? I really though that’s how it worked, but my experience seems to indicate otherwise.

That’s exactly how it works and anyone who says otherwise does not understand PageRank.

I’m confused because just about all I have left in the Google primary index is my index page,

That’s not true, see site search-

http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&rlz=1T4SUNA_en___GB207&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.review-a-gadget.com%2F&btnG=Search

You’ve got around 20 pages that aren’t supplemental results. Not great, but considering your home page PR of just PR3 what do you expect?

Google will not index hundreds/thousands of pages if you don’t have the links (PR) to indicate your site is important. PR3 is not enough for a large site.

Add to this your recent rewrite of underscore file names to hyphenated and from what I can see no 301 redirects in place (note: more bad advice from regulars of alt.internet.search-engines, tell him to 301 redirect at least people!!)-

Airsoft_Gun.php (I’m assuming that’s the old page).

should 301 redirect to the new page

Airsoft-Gun.php

You’ve temporarily knee capped your sites SERPs by not 301 redirecting old to new. It’s like starting with a new site, Google has to reindex everything and if you had any links to the underscore version you are wasting them!

Some 301 Redirect Examples

Also looks like you left the old version online as well, this could also result in duplicate content problems!

And if that wasn’t bad enough it’s an affiliate site. I know a lot about affiliate sites and Google rankings and Google HATES affiliate content with a vengeance!!

Google sees it this way….

Why should it list your Electric Glock 18 Copy Pistol FPS 175 Full Auto Airsoft Gun Review when the original version is here Electric Glock 18 Copy Pistol FPS 175 Full Auto Airsoft Gun

As a side note I almost went into selling Airsoft Pistols, started to create an ecommerce site and everything, but had problems finding a supplier. Found adult products (much higher profits) so went that way instead, which took me into search engine optimization and the rest is history

Google will tolerate affiliate content IF there’s added value to the content, just rehashing the same old affiliate crap like 10 thousand other affiliates do is not enough (I wish it was as I’d be a millionaire in about 5 years).

You could get your home page to PR6 and it won’t help (been there, got the T-shirt), it’s affiliate and in it’s present form will never rank well in Google for anything but really easy SERPs.

Sorry to say, but my advice is forget this affiliate site and move away from large affiliate sites in general. Instead create high content pages one product at a time. Actually with your low PR you’d do better this way because PR3 is barely enough to get one page ranked well let alone a large site!

Also if you actually do a review (like your domain name suggests you do)you might get some links as well.

Read a bit about my experience with affiliate sites and Google. Also take a look at Clickbank, my 15 year old son has made $200 over the last 3 weeks selling 2 clickbank products (they retail at ~$35 each).

He’s wrote reviews on the Clickbank products and has got many relevant SERPs with a site we registered just 4 months ago (still in the Google sandbox).

We are even in competition for the same SERPs (I know a good thing when I see one, so I wrote product reviews as well) and I’m only beating him by about $10 in the same 3 week period, though from the looks of it he’s going to pass me next week (he’s stealing my SERPs :-)).

Basically his site is new, but themed to this niche, I’ve just added a few pages to an existing older site, so I got the SERPs faster, but over time his site should beat mine and I think we are seeing the start of this now.

My son is lucky to have me, since I’ve already added enough text links last 6 weeks or so to his site to run a 1000 page site, (so he doesn’t have to chase text links) but even without this he could do very well in this niche with the right approach and a low PR site.

The days of gaining lots of Google traffic to easily built affiliate sites are over, it’s time to look at long term projects that involve a lot more effort and add value to your visitors.

Good Luck with your affiliate endeavors.

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