Explain this one folks.

[RegDCP]

I am doing constant SEO for my sites.
Part of my process is that I check the searches done by visitors to see where my page ranks for the terms used.
I’m doing well. Out of 70 search terms 13 are in the number 1 position, 56 on the first page with 39 in the first 5 positions.

Everything is entered in a spreadsheet for site/search term used/search engine/position/out of # of results/times searched. I also include where and how often the keywords are used in the body.

When I checked my logs this morning I saw a new search term that a visitor had used in Google.

Checking the Google search page, I found I was in the #1 position out of 201 million sites.
When I went to my page I got a real shock.
The page is only a graphic which links to an affiliate site.

Granted the page is a screen shot of the affiliate's site's mainpage, and is definitely on topic for the search term used, but this goes totally against everything I have learned.
To Google this page *should* be without content.

Anyone have any input?

[KeithO]

depends on the anchor text used to link to that image.

[jonsavvy]

This happens to us too - www.savvy.com - sites that link to us, using plugs for our content are routinely ranked higher than us.
In fact on many of the terms we are not ranked at all.

But good news, 2 weeks ago our Yahoo and Google PR was 0 - now it is 6.
The bad news, thats just for our page, all other pages are still ranked 0.

[DrTandem1]

Look at the page title, the image's file name, its alt/title text and as someone mentioned, the anchor text, plus the affiliates URL. Don't forget to check the IBLs to that page, especially with Google. Chances are the affiliate has "reciprocated" with a link back to your site and to that specific page.

[Michael Williams]

you aren't alone, I caught one of our affiliates doing the same thing but with a frameset that included their affiliate link.

This person parked it on a domain name that contains a popular search term for our products.
Interestingly, this guy got 3 sales from this kind of garbage marketing in 3 days.

I cancelled their affiliate account right away and emailed them that they are banned for life and that if they tried to sign up again under another name I would sue them. The next day they moved onto doing the same thing to someone else's website.

Always check on your affiliates, especially new ones, and when you see lots of hits or the first few sales make sure they aren't using blackhat stuff like this.

You have to be aggressive and cancel their accounts right away, and send the warning email so they will delete your content right away. Methinks that the SE's will see this kind of trick and may penalize your actual site as a result of it if you don't take action quickly, hopefully before they get to indexing that affiliate's page.

[apisdesign]

This could be happening for a number of reasons:

- the filename of your image
- the filename of your page
- your META tags. Yes, your META tags.
- your page <title>
- anchor text and context of inbound links (as previously mentioned)
- obscurity of the search term in question

And sometimes luck and voodoo are to blame. Do a search for 'amazing books' on Google. Our website (www.apis.ca) is number 8 - just ahead of amazon.com - and we're a web design company. Crazy, eh?

[SemAdvance]

keyword term competition.

Since it appears the term is one rarely used it would not seem to be one of much import or one your competitors are optimizing for.

Also image search results will come above the organic s earch result in Google, so are you sure you are looking at an organic result or the image search result???

[SemAdvance]

To further make my point

amazing book 8.5 /day Overture

On wordtracker we don't find the term until we get to.

amazing facts books 3.0 /day Wordtracker.

Amazon is undoubtedly not optimizing for this keyword.

[Spooky]

Originally Posted by Michael Williams

you aren't alone, I caught one of our affiliates doing the same thing but with a frameset that included their affiliate link.

This person parked it on a domain name that contains a popular search term for our products.
Interestingly, this guy got 3 sales from this kind of garbage marketing in 3 days.

I cancelled their affiliate account right away and emailed them that they are banned for life and that if they tried to sign up again under another name I would sue them. The next day they moved onto doing the same thing to someone else's website.

Always check on your affiliates, especially new ones, and when you see lots of hits or the first few sales make sure they aren't using blackhat stuff like this.

You have to be aggressive and cancel their accounts right away, and send the warning email so they will delete your content right away. Methinks that the SE's will see this kind of trick and may penalize your actual site as a result of it if you don't take action quickly, hopefully before they get to indexing that affiliate's page.

Do you cancel all affiliate accounts when they make 3 sales in 3 days? To my mind, sales are sales. Wish all of my affiliates made a sale every day.

[LizB]

Can you tell me what the problem is with an affiliate doing what they did?

[touchmind.com]

I think the response may be simple, the SE identify where you are launching the request and identifies that your site is the best response as you are (maybe) in the same country where the webhosting is.

is that the case?