Affiliate Traffic Problem

[amberstar702]

For several years, I was an affiliate of "X" Dating
Website - owned by an individual "Mr. X". We then had a parting of the ways for personal reasons. I had a new website redesigned, kept my same url and immediately redirected my url thru Namesecure to my new website. This was in July 2003.

I discovered today that some search engine and dating directory listings done BEFORE I severed our association still link to my old site with Mr. X - and that he has benefitted from a number of new member sign-ups since July at http://www.spicy-senior-singles.com.

I too have had sign-ups thru my new listings but I do not know how to cut this connection between my old listings and Mr. X's program.

I would have to give this information to my web designer as I am good with the creative and promotional aspects of my websites but am not technically savvy.

Help would be appreciated so I can send my traffic where it belongs. Thanks in advance.
Regards,

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Terri,

I understand your delima and did some research for you. I also am not that technical, so please check with your webmaster and also may want to ask this question of the WebPros in the search engine forum.

If you want to permantently re-direct the old pages in the engines to the new pages I think a 301 re-direct may work.

Check out this page and see if it may be a good solution.
http://www.tamingthebeast.net/articles3/spiders-301-redirect.htm

Could anyone else give suggestions or verify if what I suggested would work for Terri???

[TrafficProducer]

if your host allows it you may be able to use .htaccess
Example at old site, redirects to new site. The .htaccess text file contains...

Redirect permanent /index.html http://www.iworkveryhard.com/index.html

Or maybe use 404.html, error page, with a redirect.

It can take some time for search engines to remove old sites.

I'm not sure this is any help to you.

[amberstar702]

Thank you both for your responses. I will forward the information to my web designer and hope the problem will be solved. I also wrote to Sr Friendfinder to see what they can come up with as I am now affiliated with them and this traffic and money drain affects us both.
Regards,

[ronniethedodger]

I had a new website redesigned, kept my same url and immediately redirected my url thru Namesecure to my new website. This was in July 2003.

I discovered today that some search engine and dating directory listings done BEFORE I severed our association still link to my old site with Mr. X - and that he has benefitted from a number of new member sign-ups since July at http://www.spicy-senior-singles.com.



I too had a similar instance of this happen to me. In my case it was changing the base URL from .com to .net. The .com site was redirected by GoDaddy.

It took a few months for Google to come around and recognize that the new site was actually .net and not .com. My totally "new" .net site was getting indexed regularly by Google and for some strange reason it kept listing the .net URL with the .com extension.

My only theory on this is that both sites were hosted at the same IP address. Somehow it is the IP address that Google is actually indexing and not the URL itself. They appear to have their own DNS lookup stored internally without having to use an external lookup service. This internal database apparantly had not been updated.

I do not know how or where they get this info, nor how often they update it. I am not really sure if it actually exists, but facts do tend to lean towards it actually being there.

After a month and a half of the problem persisting, I finally shot them some email. Of course, I got back their "stock" auto-reply. They never did really answer my query, but after a couple of weeks the problem did go away. I can only assume that they corrected it at their end or the database was updated from some other means.

I don't know what your particular case is for there was not enough information to go on in your opening statement above. It does sound quite similar to my case though. If it is, then I would shoot Google (to start with) some email to the fact. Directories and portals will be tougher to eradicate I would think, especially if they are hand submitted listings and the information is not coming from crawlers or bots.