Have you ever delayed Affiliate Attribution?

Hi Guys,

Hope everyone is well.

I wanted to ask a question that could be a mixture of a few different things. Our site is around 3 months old now and is a sports betting site in Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana (as the three primary targets). Due to the Google Helpful Content update, I delayed the attribution links into the site which seems to have helped the overall SEO of the site. At this point, I am about to finalise on an integration of stats for clubs into the site - once this goes live - I am thinking it could be time to start the attribution links.

Has anyone else delayed becoming an "official affiliate" and been affected negatively in SEO or positively maybe?

With the new integrations, it seems that I should definitely start the process of being recompensed for the outlay. But, in Africa, choosing the right bookies seems very important as there are many that have not paid out - does anyone have any ideas on operators that should be considered first?

Traffic is getting better, and growth has been steady and strong - everything is written in house and there is no AI on the site - but we seem to have hit a stagnant block at the moment. It is a brand new domain with only 3 months work.

Daily Impressions - 1500
CTR - 3.2%
Average Position: 45

Thanks guys - Jamal

Every visitor that is a potential player is wasted.

You provided them zero places to go, so if your content is really good and convinced the visitor to join casino x or sportsbook y, the visitor will now move on to another affiliate to be linked to the sportsbook or will search for the brand you convinced them to join.

If you are providing direct links to the bookie, they will just visit directly, without giving you credit.

Why don't you want credit?

Rick
Universal4

In theory, inserting affiliate advertising now shouldn't have a negative impact. There are many affiliate sites with pages that rank that are plastered with ads/links to operators (though, of course, those might have some juice - or age/authority - flowing in that helps).

If you did it carefully and didn't go overboard all in one go, it would be a surprise to see a negative impact. And, in certain cases, it could have a positive impact (by increasing page relevance/answering the query).

But...

I'm guessing you have very few external inbound links. So, with the pages that are ranking, they're doing so based (almost purely) on the content alone (and remember, it's possible that you could still have an 'early boost' advantage that might yet erode naturally).

So....

If the rankings are on content alone, then adding extra might (in some cases, and depending on how you did it) dilute what's there, or in some way change the structure that's helping the page in the first place. And that you won't know until you do it. Equally, adding the operator content might increase page/subject/topic relevance.

A lot of preamble to basically say it's all uncertain. Too many factors involved, and what would work for one site/page may not work for another - either within your own site or on other sites. You'd have to compare as close to like for like as possible to get any realistic appreciation of potential impacts, and that's nigh on impossible to do.

I'd suggest if you're going to do it (which clearly you must at some point) then think it through carefully. Perhaps see what's working for competitors, and that will potentially reduce the likelihood of making hurtful introductions.

Remember the word 'relevance'.

******

There's an approach you could take that (I believe) eliminates the doubt (either with potentially positive or negative impacts), and that's to code the new content in a way that you're telling search engines to ignore it. So, in theory, they just continue reading the content that's there now and ignore the new. I can't remember that code at this late hour!! But it's simple, will dig it out tomorrow.

*****

Disclaimer - all guesswork. And some might say it's overthinking it. But has some logic behind it that makes some sense.

...here's something to try if you don't want SE's to take notice of content on a page....

Just put <aside> at the start of the content you want to 'hide' and </aside> at the end.

Obviously, be careful to get the opening and closing 'aside' in the right places.