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Some of these affiliates are our affiliates with highest revenue. the website is totally unrelated but still converts (because of massive traffic volumes)

Hey thanks. This does not explain the reason for not improving over nearly a year of link building, and actually slipping considerably this last week or so, as we have done lots of on page optimisation on hundreds of pages so I know that cannot be the main issue. Here is an example: This page was ranking 20th 9 months ago. Now 90th or so. perfect on page SEO according to everything - 99% on here (only internal links from menus etc taking it over 100). Our DA was 1 when we were ranking on page 2. Now 25 and we are on page 9 or so. https://www.fitness-savvy.co.uk/product/phd-diet-whey-2kg/ There are no links back to the personal trainers page. On page SEO for the personal trainers page says 69% on Moz, and is showing that lots of work needs to be done for the keyword "best online personal trainers". Page speed is horrendous. Keyword difficulty 25. Yet we are 5th. Sending lots of traffic to personal trainers who are no doubt making sales while no other pages of ours are ranking well at all. This page brings in more traffic then the other 5,000 or so combined pretty much. And it only has a few hundred searches per month compared with millions of searches on all the other keywords on our site. https://www.fitness-savvy.co.uk/best-online-personal-trainer-websites/ I have no idea where to put my efforts as not only are rankings not improving, but are slipping considerably. Any advice from anyone who can see what this issue is, as it must be something pretty big

A thought about blocking competitors...  Most people who land on your website are not going to purchase anything.  If your conversion rate is 2% then 98% of the visits are not made by buyers.  If you have a lot of content pages on your site that receive good traffic then your conversion rate (sitewide) is probably a lot lower. Your competitors might be bidding good money to have their ads appear on your site.  So, it might be a profitable idea to allow the ads and take a piece of your competitors' ad budgets - even if you might lose a few sales.  When you make money from ads you don't have to do any work, but when you make money from sales you must do work - not only filling orders but also supporting customers in their use of the product. We allow many competitors ads to appear on our site, especially those who because of prices or services are not real competitors.  The only exception might be those who are extreme in their price discounting or on websites that are selling consumables and have a very high rate of repeat ordering. At times we might be running low on stock or have employees out.  At those times we might become very aggressive with ads, inserting them high on the page or above the header.  These options are built into our design.

James, Thank you so much!  That is what I suspect is the case too. A handful of highly relevant, quality links is better than hundreds of junky affiliate links.  And there will be no advertisement of the network.

Thanks! I went about using my Yoast SEO plugin on my Wordpress site to simply input the canonical URL I wanted to advance the credit to

Great Post.

Hi Alan, Firstly, do you have different variations of the site targeting different languages? Or by European do you mean English speaking nations, such as the UK and Germany (surprisingly most Germans browse in English). If the former, are you targeting them properly with href lang? From my initial scan it doesn't look like that is the case. With regards to backlinks, it might be worth researching as to whether or not you could reach out to websites targeting Irish living abroad. For example, here in Australia we have IrishAroundOz, so an awareness in such a community could have positive effects (especially if they have a good reader base). I'm friends with a large number of Irish people and they'd all be more than willing to help out a fellow Irish person if they asked. Try and avoid paying any kind of fee for now, outreach to the right people should increase revenue without cost. Social is worth pursuing and doesn't have to cost much/anything. Make sure you are targeting all platforms, but Instagram is a must these days and you'd be surprised at how quickly you can build a following and start converting.

My advice: Seek and find a trusted professional who can take care of this for you. Is your site in English? My other advice: Improve English. Search more for this stuff, you actually need to read and learn a lot for the answers you are seeking. That is not a question anyone can give you a good answer to around here in one piece. Once you do more research, you find out that there are tools out there such as https://ubersuggest.io/ and google keyword planner for ads that help you get the answers you want related to keywords. but best advice for YOU is to hire a professional in my humble opinion.

That's where you'll have to roll up your sleeves and start the real SEO work. If you're lost as to where to start, check out Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO.

Yeah definitely not with a client website lol

Hi Jonathan, I can't say I'm very familiar with those particular companies, but generally affiliate marketing is promoting someone else's products or services in exchange for a commission, and remarketing is the practice of serving ads to people who've already visited your site, bought a product from you, etc. It's why ads for certain products can seem to follow you around the internet.

Thanks for your answer. Some of our clients are some of the biggest insurers in the US. It still won't affect them?

How long ago did you implement canonicals to fix the issue? Its important to remember that a lot of SEO isn't about quick fixes. Some of these things will take weeks/months to completely filter through and for you to see the outcomes you were looking for. You could "NoIndex, Follow" the pages if you really wanted to but I'd suggest waiting a bit longer for the canonicals to start working. If the canonicals really don't seem to be working for some/all of those pages, and you don't want to give it more time after a few weeks, then you could reasonably "NoIndex, Follow" the pages... but you could be harming link equity that would have been attributed to the canon page. As for the 301 idea, it would really depend upon what the filtering parameters are doing. If its filtering out sections of a page for users or its helping you determining lead attribution in analytics, then I wouldn't want to indiscriminately 301 them. If they're being autogenerated but have canonicals in them from the start then you should be fine. Like above though, if after a few weeks of them existing with canonicals Google still is throwing duplicate errors at you for those specific pages then you can NonIndex them if you feel it is necessary.

I'm not sure how you're blocking Google from crawling external links in the robots.txt file--typically you only block them from crawling internal pages on your site. If you're using a script, though, to track the clicks on external links and that script is running your site (and you're blocking that script in robot.txt), then that still should be fine. You may want to add a "nofollow" tag on those links, though, so you don't end up passing link "credit" or "link juice" to those affiliates (unless you want to do that?). As far as external links go, though, it's typically okay (and expected) that you link out to other sites.

The two affiliate sites are well etablished and huge sites, so I guess they know what they are doing... Lots of affiliates are really smart people.  They often have websites that are much more powerful than the vendors that they sell for.  The result of that is that their sites will often displace the program site in Google search results - because they are more powerful. Lots of people say that people who copy your content will not outrank you, but those folks need to upgrade their knowledge.  If your content is published on more powerful sites or lots of less powerful sites you can be outranked or filtered from the SERPs. If you tell these folks to take down what is currently published on their website or point rel=canonical to your site you run the risk of them refusing or taking your product off of their page and replacing it with your competitors product. The best way to fix this is to look towards the future and have rules for all new affiliates that they must not republish content from your website.   That will reduce the number of affiliates that you acquire and you run the risk of them writing really bad content that misrepresents your product. Affiliates can be your strongest ally or your strongest competitor.  Tread carefully.

So, digging deeper into this issue, it turns out that we can't rely on status code as a reliable indicator of page validity for affiliate network URLs. Most of them turn up with a 200. Looking at possible custom solutions from affiliate compliance monitoring services now. No one seems to be doing this thing that I need to do, but it sounds like a great business idea for someone with coding experience and more entrepreneurial spirit than I've got. Just gonna throw that out there.

Yeah that is strange. I'm stumped on that one myself. The info I'm finding on awin1, awclick.php, etc. is all kind of loose and not very helpful anyway. Very odd. I'll be curious to hear if you figure out why that seems to be inserted in between destinations for you. Good luck, and if I come across anything else I'll post here as well.

Everett Perfect I see you got the gist of my conversation. What im going for is trying to keep the focus on the static and dynamic content while keeping the fluid content from bloating search results in the end I believe this is of benefit to search engines so they can separate the meat from the bone and I dont expend crawl budgets on thin content.

I'm with Alick300, using an event on the onclick event on the link is the way to go.  If you run jQuery on your pages, it should be pretty easy to select all the links going to tripadvisor.com and attach the goal tracking event code after the page has loaded.  It'll be 1 line of jQuery code... you shouldn't need to go through and add this to thousands of links by hand.