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Is it possible to promote your free affiliate website in Search Engines for Organic Search? I don’t think so. Here I’m talking about affiliate website you get for free when you sign up for affiliate program like www.ytbtravel.com so your website url ends up being something like www.ytbtravel.com/username .

My friend emailed me about this great Travel Opportunity he signed up for and registered domain name so he can promote it and make some money. He wanted me to look at his website and help him Optimize it for Search Engines to start ranking better in SERP’s. It is a great money making opportunity he just went the wrong way about it.

I did, looked at the page source and it was clear to me. This is what I found and told him.

First off his website ( www.gopetetravel.com) is redirecting to the affiliate website http://www.ytbtravel.com/kpete which is automatic red flag by search engines. I just ran it through couple of tools to confirm this.

First I ran it through Search Engine Friendly URL Redirect Checker and this is the result it returned:
“This website returned a 302 which is either not search engine friendly or a redirect.”

You will NEVER rank good in Google or any Search engine with this kind of redirect.

301 Search engine friendly redirect is the way to do any redirect but that is whole another subject. Let me explain some things first then I will tell you about second tool I used.

Being an affiliate website it is hosted and controlled by whoever provides affiliate program and website (YTBtravel.com in this case) so you don’t have control over the title, description or keyword meta tags (these are in the code of the webpage and are not seen by visitors but only search engines). Search engines uses those tags to determine what your site is about so they can serve your site as a relevant search result when someone searches Google (or Yahoo, MSN,..) for specific terms (keywords).

For example if you are looking for travel information on the Internet, you would go to Google and type in the search box “travel” , than Google engine goes and spiders or crawls websites (and pages) that have “travel” keywords on them to return most relevant content to you. Now first place Google looks is the content of your webpage, it is looking for text and finds keywords in the text, so if you have article on the web page that talks about travel, that will be relevant result for that search term.

Next place it will look is title, description and keyword meta tags and if you don’t have these properly optimized (no keywords in these tags), it will give you less “weight” or relevancy. It is the same if you have meta tags with targeted keywords but no text or content on the page to back it up. So ultimately you want to have some text (content) and properly optimized meta tags to get the best results. This rule applies for any keyword/term/phrase or niche you want to have website in.

Another thing is when I looked at the page source (the code) of his website, there is no text (content) at all. All there is is javascript and Google doesn’t read javascript. So even though the website looks cool and it has “Caribbean Vacation” “Cruise Vacation” “Travel Deals” that you and I can read, Google can’t and it can’t give any value to your page. In Google’s eyes there is nothing of value on that page.
And being an free affiliate website you don’t have control over content on it so you can’t go and put an article or some text that talks about the topic.

You see Google’s main objective as a Search Engine is to serve people MOST RELEVANT information when they search for it and they are getting good in doing just that. That’s why everybody loves Google and they grew huge in just few short years, they are bigger than Yahoo, MSN or any other search engine out there. Just think about it, when you go search something on the web you don’t want to go through 20 websites that are just affiliate links and you have to click and click and click to finally get to the one that has information you were looking for. That is why if you want to rank at the top of the Google you need to have CONTENT and quality content at best or “Authority” , High Page Rank.

What do I mean by “Authority” is that there are sites that don’t have much content on the main page but still they rank high. This is because they have built authority by thousands other websites linking to them (through affiliate program and other means) and they have been on the internet for a while.

Lets do an example again. Go to Google and type in “travel”. What is the #1 site (organic search not sponsored)?
It is Travelocity.com . OK, notice couple of things (for one there are 736 MILLION results or websites for “travel” very hard to compete) they have PR of 8.
Notice how it is displayed on Google as result:

Travel: Airfares, hotels, vacations, cruises, car rentals and more …
Book travel for less with Travelocity’s specials on airfares, hotels, cruises, car rentals and more.
www.travelocity.com/

First Line (bold) is their title meta tag, second line is their description meta tag and followed by URL and looking in their page source, they do have keyword meta tag as well.
Now let’s look at my friend’s.

YTB Travel Network – Go Pete Travel

http://www.ytbtravel.com/kpete

First of all every YTB affiliate have YTB Travel Network – in the title tag on their affiliate website. There are thousands of YTB affiliates and their affiliate websites and they are all the same, why would Google pick yours among others. Again Google wants not just content but UNIQUE content, there would be no point in displaying hundreds of exactly the same websites in search results. Unique is the key in here.
Also there are NO description tag, just affiliate url of the website.

There are many things that play important role in getting high rank in search results on search engines (specifically Google) but these are the basics of Search engine Optimization (SEO).

Bottom line is you CAN NOT promote your free affiliate website via organic/natural (free) means. The only way to get traffic (and sales) with this kind of website is SPONSORED search which comes up at the very top and on right side of search results. But you need to pay money for this and for term “travel” you’d be paying close to $10 per click (on Google) if not more because it is HOT market. There is a cure for that as well but again that is a different subject (Read about it on This post: Making $300 a day online! )
The only way to promote this kind of website, get some traffic and sales is to have your own website or blog and write about it and link to it.

So here were my suggestions to him:

1. Go to Blogger.com and sign up for free blog. When you choose the blog title and blog address, use word “travel” in those – it is important.
Once you have it start writing short articles about travel. Your own experiences or whatever about traveling.

2.Remove that redirect from your domain ( www.gopetetravel.com) and setup your own Wordpress blog on it. (I can help installing, setting up and optimizing it) and again start blogging (writing) about travel.

There are more things you need to do to get this going quicker and create the “Buzz” like social networking, etc. but it is already midnight here, I got to get to bed. I will try to finish this tomorrow.

What are your thoughts on this? Any Suggestions?