Affiliating Explained

The Dark Wizard

Well-known member
Some users have asked me what it really means for them and their site to affiliate with someone, so I will try to the best of my ability explain it here.

Affiliating has two important goals, one short and one long and I will explain each below:

Long Term Goal: Pagerank, pagerank, pagerank.

Our almighty and all knowing lord, google uses over 200 variables in their formula to determine how popular your site is on the search engine and one of the few variables that we mere mortals are allowed to know about is called pagerank. It goes from 0-10 and twitter is a 9 last time I checked.

To get a higher pagerank you need good quality links pointing to your site(this is why spam bots go and spam links on sites so Google indexes them and then their pagerank goes up).

When an affiliate has their link area on every page, google considers that a brand new different link pointing to you each and every page. (This is why by default links in signatures in most forums have nofollow)

The higher the pagerank is, the more your site will popup in the engine and your traffic will eventually fuel it self.

Short Term Goal:

Obviously indexing links and the such takes google a while but there are immediate rewards to affiliating and that is local traffic from the other site instead of Google.

Though it can backfire quite often if you affiliate with a site that is in the same niche as you.

Lets say I am a member of Forum A which deals in games and that board affiliates one day with Forum B which also deals with games. As a member I will not go to Forum B because I already have an awesome gaming forum.

Example you want:

As a member of gaming Forum A which deals with games, I notice that one day they affiliated with Forum B which deals with RPing/Writing. I decide to check it out and register and end up liking it. Now I have a forum dedicated to gaming and one to RPing/Writing.

This is also why a bunch of times out there you will be told to focus on one niche because chances are someone will always be doing something better then you.(Can't be a super mega board for all types of things) Those have the hardest time getting traffic.

It also helps to affiliate with sites bigger or similar in size to you.


As an example my RPing/Writing site affiliated with a tech site and a warcraft3 gaming site and increased my site's pagerank to 3 within the first 3 weeks of purchasing the new domain.(It takes sometimes 2+ for sometites with 100+ affiliates to even get that far because they typically do it within the same niche and google will more often then not just mark it as similar content and not really promote yours.

-------------------------------------

I hope I was able to educate some users and if you want to affiliate here just post about it, maybe we can get a ring going of good quality affiliations.

My site is up for affiliating if you are of similar size: http://www.rpdom.com
 
Some users have asked me what it really means for them and their site to affiliate with someone, so I will try to the best of my ability explain it here.

Affiliating has two important goals, one short and one long and I will explain each below:

Long Term Goal: Pagerank, pagerank, pagerank.

Our almighty and all knowing lord, google uses over 200 variables in their formula to determine how popular your site is on the search engine and one of the few variables that we mere mortals are allowed to know about is called pagerank. It goes from 0-10 and twitter is a 9 last time I checked.

To get a higher pagerank you need good quality links pointing to your site(this is why spam bots go and spam links on sites so Google indexes them and then their pagerank goes up).

When an affiliate has their link area on every page, google considers that a brand new different link pointing to you each and every page. (This is why by default links in signatures in most forums have nofollow)

The higher the pagerank is, the more your site will popup in the engine and your traffic will eventually fuel it self.

Short Term Goal:

Obviously indexing links and the such takes google a while but there are immediate rewards to affiliating and that is local traffic from the other site instead of Google.

Though it can backfire quite often if you affiliate with a site that is in the same niche as you.

Lets say I am a member of Forum A which deals in games and that board affiliates one day with Forum B which also deals with games. As a member I will not go to Forum B because I already have an awesome gaming forum.

Example you want:

As a member of gaming Forum A which deals with games, I notice that one day they affiliated with Forum B which deals with RPing/Writing. I decide to check it out and register and end up liking it. Now I have a forum dedicated to gaming and one to RPing/Writing.

This is also why a bunch of times out there you will be told to focus on one niche because chances are someone will always be doing something better then you.(Can't be a super mega board for all types of things) Those have the hardest time getting traffic.

It also helps to affiliate with sites bigger or similar in size to you.


As an example my RPing/Writing site affiliated with a tech site and a warcraft3 gaming site and increased my site's pagerank to 3 within the first 3 weeks of purchasing the new domain.(It takes sometimes 2+ for sometites with 100+ affiliates to even get that far because they typically do it within the same niche and google will more often then not just mark it as similar content and not really promote yours.

-------------------------------------

I hope I was able to educate some users and if you want to affiliate here just post about it, maybe we can get a ring going of good quality affiliations.

My site is up for affiliating if you are of similar size: http://www.rpdom.com


Yeaaaah, you've got some learning to do about SEO.

Good luck
 
Interesting read, but I'm still left wondering how I go about affiliating? What is the best technique and usage?
 
Yeaaaah, you've got some learning to do about SEO.

Good luck

I never said I knew anything about SEO(The entire point of this was to explain affiliating and how it effects Pathranking which is a part of the overall giant picture of SEO) but the way I understand affiliating is not incorrect either which is more then what most people understand and I'm just speaking from years of experience and things I've seen for my self. Anyone is welcomed to come correct me if they see fit, I'm willing to learn.

Interesting read, but I'm still left wondering how I go about affiliating? What is the best technique and usage?
Affiliating just means that you put someone elses link on your site(typically the bottom or the side) where google can see it and they do the same for you.

There really is no best technique/usage. I typically handle it the way I stated above.

Though if you have some examples of a situation or more details you can provide I can try to answer them.
 
Really what you are talking about is a link exchange... Which Google has thousands of really smart engineers working to make sure they don't put any weight on artificial links (including link exchanges).

Side note - site wide/footer links (and irrelevant links to your site) are more or less useless these days.

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Really what you are talking about is a link exchange... Which Google has thousands of really smart engineers working to make sure they don't put any weight on artificial links (including link exchanges).

Side note - site wide/footer links (and irrelevant links to your site) are more or less useless these days.

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For more detailed information, see our cookies page.
Link exchanges no longer work. You call them affiliates, we used to call them web-rings.

Shame.

So if that is the case then what is the benefits of the people who use that xrumer spam bot thing and target high pagerank sites.

I always thought spamming link exchange was worthless but if a pagerank 9 site linked back to a pagerank 1 site that it would have great efforts for the pr1 site.

What do you guys recommend for SEO/Pagerank then?
 
Shame.

So if that is the case then what is the benefits of the people who use that xrumer spam bot thing and target high pagerank sites.

I always thought spamming link exchange was worthless but if a pagerank 9 site linked back to a pagerank 1 site that it would have great efforts for the pr1 site.

What do you guys recommend for SEO/Pagerank then?
It's totally cliche, but SEO these days is really about making your site the best site/experience it can be for end users... The rest will come. I have done zero link exchanges in the past, and Google Webmaster Tools lists the following number of links for various sub-domains:

forums.digitalpoint.com - 13,238,160
tools.digitalpoint.com - 4,914,036
products.digitalpoint.com - 2,754,844
www.digitalpoint.com - 267,535
marketplace.digitalpoint.com - 124,279
articles.digitalpoint.com - 45,349
directory.digitalpoint.com - 87 (haha)

It's a fairly good measure of what parts of the site are most popular (if you couldn't look at Google Analytics data directly).

The point is that the best SEO really is "no" SEO... Just focus on your site and making it something compelling that users want to tell their friends about because it's so good. You will get natural links that way because people will blog about it or just put a link to it on their own site so they can get to it easier. If you ever sit back and honestly think your site is as good as it can be, you are wrong... because no site in the universe is that.
 
Oh also... PageRank (at least the publicly displayed one that is a scale of 0-10) is more or less pointless as well. Would you rather have a PR10 site that gets no search engine traffic or a PR1 site that gets a ton of search engine traffic?

My site has fluctuated between PR4 and PR8 over the years, and never has search engine rankings or organic search engine traffic varied. Let's take an example of the last time it changed for the forums... On September 23, 2011 it went from PR4 to PR6 (one of the reasons people come to my site is because of the tools that show this historical data for your site):

Image%202012.12.12%2011:05:27%20AM.png


Now... let's compare how much more traffic we started getting from organic search results (presumably higher PageRank means higher rankings in Google, right?). Google Analytics shows more or less no change (slight increase but we always see that historically with normal growth over time). Incoming users from Google search the week before and week after going from PR4 to PR6:

Image%202012.12.12%2011:11:07%20AM.png
 
XRumer used to work for link development... Not so much anymore though. The problem is people who use it are too stupid to know. :)

You could argue it still drives traffic since some users will click on the links it spams.
 
I would think the relative cost per spam post is so low that they assume (and probably are correct about) the success rate doesn't have to be very high to break even.
 
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