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Hi Robert, Thanks for the great answer. You've explained it very well Cheers!

Google's affiliate program is done through their custom links which then redirect, which means they're all no-follow links. With Panda, Google's basically saying that everyone's going to be no-follow from here on out for all affiliate programs, even if they have built in no-follows or redirects that are already not passing link juice.

What EGOL said and what Sebes said combined. If you want to run your affiliate links through an internal 302 redirect first (so that you can better track click activity) then that is a pretty well established process. You'd want to nofollow those links, of course. But cloaking? Nope. Don't even think about it. I recently had an issue where the developers put up a global header nav that used javascript. The JS was in a folder called /js/, which was blocked in the robots.txt file. Within an hour the site was penalized. google still showed the global header nav in their preview so I know they rendered the JS. My guess is after rendering they said, hey wait - the page Chrome/Browser rendered for our preview doesn't look like the page our standard Googlebot sees. They must be cloaking. Keep it simple and don't try to fool people who are a lot smarter than you. That's what I've learned over the years.

Thanks for the clarification, C2G, I'm the Local SEO Associate here in Q&A. Speaking from a purely Local perspective, yes, the job ahead of you for the separate insurance business will be to build a good website with strong geographic hooks in it, following basic local optimization best practices. You will want to linkbuild to the site. Off the site, you will want to claim any existent profiles, make sure there are no violations on any of them, check for duplicates and other problems and fill in the blanks where there are not currently listings but should be. In my opinion, the absolute easiest tasks are for brand new businesses with no Internet presence at all, because you are starting from scratch and have total control over getting things done right the first time around. I find it a little more challenging doing the sleuthing for an existent business in order to turn up all records that pre-exist for their business to verify their correctness, but this is certainly not impossible. Regarding reserving the domain name...it has long been considered a good trust signal with SEs to purchase a domain name for at least a few years at a time. Insurance is a dog eat dog world...you want to encourage the client to do all he can to appear trustworthy.

Hi Yannick, thank's for replying to my question. I came up with similar conclusions and this was actually the reason for posting this question. I am sure that it's a piece a cake for Google to distinguish affiliated links from standard links and I see a logical reason behind putting different value on those, but I was hopping that somebody would speak from experience, e.g. tested both kinds of links and knows what difference in strength they carry.

Ohh.  I get it now. I really don't see how that would be violating Google's ToS.  You're doing reviews of products on your blog and you're linking out to the brands / products you review?  You're getting paid to do this?  I think as long as you're getting paid to do real, objective reviews I don't see how Google would care.    I think you have a reasonable defense if anything ever came up, but I doubt it would.  Google shouldn't pick on your site as long as you don't do anything silly.

Well if your maintaining the same keyword positions but seeing less traffic it could be less search this year, changes to your meta descriptions which have messed your CTR up, ppc ads for those terms more competitive therefore better offers in the ads (discount codes etc). Can you say one of the keywords you are ranking for which has not moved but you have seen a decrease in traffic for? If an affiliate gets crawled more often then you, you might find when you add new products or content which is inside of your datafeed (networks pull this every 24 hours) and the affiliate does say a cron job on your feed every couple hours they could have your content picked up before you.

Ha, I agree, though I think it gradually starts skewing in one direction.

Google Analytics will not track anything after the # in the URL. I suggest using Google's tracking tags and coming up with an internal naming system. Since your affiliates are paid, I wouldn't worry too much about them not copy tracking tags as long as you're very clear that they have to link with the very specific URL.

I'm sorry, I'll have to look into iframes, but can you tell me how the user will stay on the site?

This YouMoz post also covers some ideas for "boring" industries. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/3-steps-to-social-seo-for-your-boring-ass-clients.

Hello Joshua, thanks for your answer. I have looked at Chitika last week and nothing on the web site was mentioning that it would deal with 'international' ads. For example, I would like the program to display french ads to people in french speeking country, like Adsense would do. Do you know if any of the following would do that? I have proposed my web site to Chitika and I have been approved to Silver level. But based on the following information they send me, I will never be on the Gold level and I have the feeling that I will not see french ads. "How do I get approved for Gold Level ads? To qualify for Gold Level ads, your domain should get at least 5000 impressions per day from US Search Engines. If you meet this requirement, you can be reviewed for Gold Level ads in two different ways:" This is after that I have decided to post the question on SEO. I need an affiliate program that can deal with web users in various country and that can deal with a french web site.

Hi Guillaume. I would like to help you and I feel the best way to do so is really clarify what you are asking. I have read your Q&A and looked at your site. Here is how your question reads to me: "We are trying to create a bunch of websites, then manipulate search engine results so our sites rank well. We have taken many steps to fool the search engines, but they seem to keep catching us in a matter of weeks. How can we fool the search engines?" You may disagree with that summary, but you will be hard pressed to convince me, or more importantly the search engines of anything different. The best practice is to create a single, well designed site. All the text should be manually written word by word. A human needs to write all of the text. Pretend for a moment you only have one website. Pour your heart and soul into that website. Build it to be the best website on the planet for your product or service. The website will then become "real" both to search engines and your customers. Search engines have billions of dollars invested in search quality. Even if you do manage to fool them, it is only a matter of time until they figure out any manipulation and penalize your site.