Checking for affiliates. Yandex filters - for affiliation, duplicate snippets, adult content and aggressive advertising

Affiliates are sites that are owned by the same company and actually duplicate each other. A common reason for most affiliate sites is the desire to monopolize a certain group of user requests and thereby increase the sale of their products or services. In most cases, the site owners go the simplest way here: they duplicate information. An affiliate filter is a tool designed to combat such “illegal” promotion of resources. As a result of applying the Affiliate filter in the search results, the user will see only one of the company's sites, and not all of its clones.

Affiliate is not always a violation

There are also Affiliate sites that are necessary to highlight different areas of activity of the same large company. And it is not subject to authorization. Yandex affiliate filter, for example, is one of the most sensitive among other search engines. But at the same time, the filter here is not in the literal sense of the word a sanction, but only serves as a kind of marking and screening out identical sites belonging to the same owner. Therefore, it is important, while creating separate sites for various areas of the company's activities, not to leave any reason for the Affiliate filter to work.

A collection of sites that carry different information to users and satisfy different needs, even having the same details specified in contacts, will be practically unaffected by Affiliate filters. The only moment where search engines can block several sites and leave one, the most pumped and trustworthy - these are branded queries.

How to deal with or prevent the Affiliate filter from being applied

If you deliberately want to create one or more additional sites to increase sales, and do not want the Yandex Affiliate filter to "bring you out of the water", or you need to remove the Affiliate filter, you will have to make a number of efforts.

First, save yourself the risk of being “leaked” by competitors. For this, it would be ideal for each site to have a separate manager and a phone number. It is advisable not to indicate on sites legal entity and a license, because this information in particularly profitable industries will also become a tool in the hands of competitors. If we are talking about large-scale financial projects, it is better to have a separate legal entity for each site.

As for the technical nuances: close the owner's data with privacy settings, or better - on different servers or hosting (with different IP).

And finally, the structural elements of sites: work hard on different uRL structure, modification of CSS codes and styles, different title generation. This is at least. For online stores, etc. create a different directory structure. It is highly desirable for any type of site to have unique content and design, at least for top products if their number is too wide. It will be easier for services.

I continue to publish materials based on my speech at SEOConference 2015. In this article, we will look at how to check the affiliation of sites in Yandex.

As usual, at the beginning of a little tedious theory for neophytes. If Yandex determines that two sites belong to the same company, then they are considered affiliated, as a result, in search results for the same request, only one of the sites is displayed.

Excerpt from Yandex.Webmaster help:

We try not to index or do not rank high: site groups of the same owner / companyproviding the user with the same goods or services, created with the aim of filling multiple positions in search results and collecting traffic ...

Excerpt from the Search Club:

One of the general principles of building high-quality SERP is providing a variety of results upon request... The search algorithm is tuned to provide this diversity. To do this, different approaches are used and many factors are involved. The term "affiliate filter" was coined by SEOs. Usually it is understood as the general case of the absence of a site in the search for any request simultaneously with other sites ...

With all this, if you write to Plato about the affiliate filter, you will most likely get a reply, something like this:

We do not guarantee the finding of any sites for certain requests in the search results. Yandex's task is to show users high-quality, diverse information on the topic of the request, and in this sense, there are no problems with the requests you specified. Your site is well indexed and searched according to its relevance to user requests. There are no restrictions on its ranking on our part. We cannot consider the question of why a particular site is not found or is poorly found for a particular query, why its place in the search results has changed, etc., for a purpose other than improving algorithms, we cannot, this activity goes beyond the framework of our tasks.

And if you bother too much, they may tell you that there are no affiliates at all 🙂

I apologize for the delay in answering. Unfortunately, I can not comment on the "affiliation" of the sites you indicated, we do not operate with similar concepts.

In my opinion, such "excuses" once again demonstrate that Platonians do not see everything that happens with your site.

From the SEO point of view, the problem of affiliation can be roughly divided into 2 types:

• There is a client who has two (or more) sites and your task is to check whether Yandex considers these sites to be affiliates or not.
• There is a client who (according to him) has only one site, which for some reason does not rank “normally” in terms of queries, and you suspect that the matter may be in affiliation with some site from the top.

In the first case you need to take two sites and check them for affiliation using a special request in Yandex:

lang: ru ~~ domain: ua<< (url:www.site1.ru | url:www.site2.ru)

If only one site is searched for this request, then the sites are affiliates. If both sites are searched, then they are not affiliated.

Just a few comments on the request:

• First, make sure that each page is individually indexed, if someone is suddenly not in the know, then the "url" operator is sensitive to www / without_www.
• Domain: ua construction - it is not critical that it is ua, any domain zone will do, the main thing is that both sites being checked have a different top-level domain.

For clarity, an example from www.demis-promo.ru and www.demis.ru, there is only one site in the search results:

And the opposite example, www.bdbd.ru and kokoc.com, in the results of both sites:

Regarding the second casewhen you don't know for sure if there is a "second site", the scheme is as follows:

• Take basic queries from SY
• Check positions on them
• Select queries where the site is not in the top 50 (top 100)
• For each request, upload the top 10 (top 30)
• Modify requests from the syllabus (see below)
• Check positions for all modified requests
• Select sites excluding which there is growth

Regarding the modification of queries, let's say you checked the top 10 for [website promotion] and got the results (from 1st to 10th place):

• kokoc.com
• optimism.ru
• mediamayak.ru
• apollo-8.ru
• iseo.ru
• promo-venta.ru
• perfectseo.ru
• ssve.ru
• ubu.ru
• vikiweb.ru

Now we add an "exception" to the original request from the results of each domain, we get new requests for verification:

website promotion ~~ site: kokoc.com

website promotion ~~ site: optimism.ru

website promotion ~~ site: mediamayak.ru

website promotion ~~ site: apollo-8.ru

website promotion ~~ site: iseo.ru

website promotion ~~ site: promo-venta.ru

website promotion ~~ site: perfectseo.ru

website promotion ~~ site: ssve.ru

website promotion ~~ site: ubu.ru

website promotion ~~ site: vikiweb.ru

After that, we check the position of the main site against the new list. If there is growth somewhere, then a candidate for the main check has been found. It is difficult to explain in more detail on the fingers, so we watch the video:

And that's all. Questions?

P.S. Did you know that Sasha Alaich (yes, the same author of FastTrust) has now opened his own studio and offers everyone website promotion? If I didn't know how, I would definitely turn to him 🙂

Hello friends! I promised you that I will not abandon posting about SEO on my blog, which is why you love it.

Today is another publication from my colleague - Alexey: search engine affiliate filter... It would seem that the topic is old, it is many years old. And why write about it again? Firstly, in search engines everything changes constantly, not only filters and sanctions, but also the methods of their determination. In confirmation of this - while this publication was being written, one of the methods for determining the filter stopped working. Therefore, relevance in such matters is the main thing.

Our post is the most current instruction on the day of publication (in the yard in 2018). Well, and secondly, I will try to keep it up to date when something suddenly changes.

I give the floor to Alexei.

Fast
updated
18.10.2018

The so-called among SEOs an affiliate filter is an attempt by search engines to resist the monopolization of search results, that is, to prevent situations when for any queries in the search results there are simultaneously several sites belonging to the same company. Such sites are called affiliates (from the English affiliate, branch).

An example of the positions of the same site, only in comparison with an affiliate competitor, the screenshot clearly shows the change in the relevant document: the page of the first site began to rank in the search, and the page of the second disappeared from the search results, while the pages themselves continue to be in the search engine index.

How to find an affiliate site if you don't know it in advance

How to check resources for affiliation

Method of checking for affiliate filter # 1

The bottom line is to set a special search query to which both resources would be relevant:

We check that both sites are displayed, now we need to group the results, for this we can add some rubbish to the request after the negation operator, for example:

If after grouping the search results one resource remains, then there is affiliation between them, if both sites remain in the search results, then there is no affiliation. Here is a similar check for sites that are not known to be affiliates:

How to find an affiliate filter, method # 2

We can say that this method has experienced a rebirth since some time ago it became inoperative, but now it works again.

The essence of the check is to exclude one of the sites from the search results. Let's consider the example of affiliates http://kranarenda.ru/ and http://realkraninvest.ru/

First, let's enter a query that is relevant for both sites and make sure that there is only one site in the search results, for example:

Next, minus the site that is in the SERP. To do this, add after the request “~~ site: adres-sayta.ru” if the second site after that appears in the search results, then we can conclude that an affiliate filter has been applied.

How to find an affiliate filter, method # 3

1. Unload the list of requests for which the resource has ceased to be in search or for which positions have started to “blink”.
2. Collect a list of all competitors for these queries in the top 10 or top 30 search results.
3. Compare the positions for these queries from your site and competing sites from the top - look for a competitor whose positions are maximally opposite to your site, i.e. if for some request your site is present in the search results, then the affiliate will not be there and vice versa.

The nuance is that checking positions through xml output will not give a result, since somewhere in June-July 2018 Yandex disabled the influence of the affiliate filter on xml results. Therefore, this method works only if you parse the real output, or check it manually in advance.

How to parse real Yandex search results in Key Collector

First, you need to check the settings so that the mode of parsing the output by xml is not enabled:

After checking the settings, we start parsing and compare the positions.

Algorithm:

1. Go to the tab: Data collection
2. We start parsing real Yandex search results
3. After removing the issue positions, we select the keys of interest to us
4. Go to the tab: Additional statistics
5. Select the tab: Positions in the PS
6. We look at what positions were on the request (pay attention to the target. Pages may change)

Already a non-working method that is not worth wasting time

The method was similar to the one described above, the only difference is that instead of the operator url used domain, and the query itself looked like this:. The bottom line was that if both sites were present in the search results, then one could assume that there was no filter, but if there was only 1 site in the search results, then the next step was a check - the parameter was added to the URL pag \u003d u (thus we ungrouped the search results), and if after that the second site appeared in the search results, then it was possible to determine the presence of an affiliate filter.

It used to look something like this:

Now the work of this operator has changed and it will not be possible to get adequate results.

Another non-working way to check for an affiliate filter

It was necessary to use a citation search by titles. To do this, the page titles were indicated in quotation marks like this (without square brackets):

If there was only one result in the search results, then it could be concluded that these are affiliates. However, now such a request in any case leaves only one result in the search results, even if the sites are not affiliates, for example:

How to get out of the Yandex affiliate filter

Eliminate possible causes of overlapping filter

If the filter was applied in an algorithmic way, then it is necessary to eliminate all possible causes of its overlap. The sanctions will be lifted automatically immediately after the algorithm stops recording these reasons.

From experience: this period can take from several days to several weeks. If the filter is applied manually, then it must also be removed manually, it will not disappear by itself. Therefore, after eliminating the possible causes of the filter imposition, it is imperative to write to Plato.

Write a letter to Plato

Before contacting Plato, you need to know one thing - Yandex does not recognize such a thing as an affiliate filter. Therefore, you also should not operate with this concept if you want to get a substantive answer.

I can give advice based on personal experience: determine in advance which resource your site is affiliated with, collect statistics on the positions of sites in the search results. In your appeal, ask a question with an emphasis on the consequences, immediately inform that your sites belong to different companies, if there are suspicions why the search engine may think differently, then it is worth adding additional justifications.

For example: below is the correspondence with Plato regarding the affiliation of my promoted site with one of the competitors. Presumably, the reason for the imposition of sanctions could be the same plug-in for generating information about delivery (intersection by design, delivery points, delivery costs), there is also an overlap on the sites on the assortment - about 80% of the goods are the same and some of the positions have identical prices (coincidence):

After this appeal, after about a couple of weeks, the situation changed and the site began to rank normally.

Finally: what do search engines themselves write about affiliates?

“As stated in our Webmaster Guidelines, sites should include original content of interest to users. This is especially important for developers participating in affiliate programs. The positions of partner sites in the search results can be low, since they usually publish product descriptions that are also presented on other resources of the partner network. This means that these sites have little original content, such as additional information about products and their categories.

Google experts believe that low-quality affiliate sites are useless for users, especially if there are many such resources in the affiliate network. These sites are often groups of generic or low-quality pages that host the same content. Users don't like it when they see multiple pages with the same content in search results. "

That's all for today. Thanks for attention. Ask questions and write comments.

And at the very end, I want to announce a future seo post from Alexey, who he described as follows: "in short, it will be something like describing an algorithm for optimizing a resource for BB + a couple of small examples, so this is also half a case."

The affiliate filter is applied by search engines (PS) to sites of the same thematic focus. This happens when the PS determines that these web resources belong to one company.

Thus, Yandex, Google and other Internet search services prevent overly active companies from filling the entire TOP in search. This is a kind of antitrust search engine module.

What does this filter entail?

The affiliate filter is not very strict. If you fall under this type of sanctions, only one of the sites will be shown in the search. Moreover, for some requests the pages of the first site will appear, and for the other - the second.

There are no other penalties at the moment.

If for some reason one of the resources falls out of the search, then the other will be shown.

A more unpleasant situation arises if the search engine glues your site to the site of your competitor. Then you should join forces and try to get the truth through correspondence. Otherwise, all your efforts to develop the project will be in vain.

By what indicators is the affiliate filter applied?

The indicators by which you can fall under the filter can be divided into two groups:

1. Direct or explicit.
2. Indirect.

Direct indicators clearly indicate that two or more sites belong to the same owner. These include:

• Name of the organization.
• Organization addresses.
• Contact phone numbers.
• Other contact details - email addresses, skype, etc.
• Payment details.
• Pickup addresses.
• The data on organizations on the website and in various reference books are the same.
• Prices for goods and services are the same.
• The same site owner.
• One domain name owner (whois).
• Very similar content, texts, graphics, videos.

Indirect indicators include the following:

• Hosting match.
• Same CMS.
• Matching IP addresses.
• NS servers match.
• Similar domain names.

If any of them match, then this will not mean that the web resources belong to the same owner, but if most of these factors coincide, then the likelihood of sanctions being imposed increases.

It is also possible to fall under the sanctions when conducting contextual advertising campaigns for different sites under one account, paying the costs from one account, with the same ad texts.

Some experts complained that the filter included resources that had one account in Yandex.Metrica and Yandex.Webmaster. But this is very rare. Apparently, in such cases, there were coincidences on other factors.

How to determine if a site is affiliated

If you have several sites of the same subject and the position of one of them has significantly decreased, then it is very likely that it fell under an affiliate. How can you be sure of this?

The easiest way is to use the PixelPlus service for checking https://tools.pixelplus.ru/tools/affiliation). The service has a subsection to analyze this situation.

There are several more services that will help us determine the ownership of several sites by the same owner. This does not mean that these resources will necessarily fall under the filter, but if other indicators coincide, then the risk increases significantly.

• The 2ip.ru service shows the connection of domains by one E-mail (https://2ip.ru/domain-list-by-email/), as well as a list of sites on one IP-address.
• Here we can see information from the registrar for each domain https://www.nic.ru/whois/
• The Recipdonor service also provides data on domain name owners - http://www.recipdonor.com/infowhois.

You can check the risk of affiliate overlap by searching. To do this, you can enter the company's contact information, phone number, company name, or some other indicators in the search bar.

Of course, if the owner registered his site in some directories, then the data may coincide, so the analysis will take some time.

What you should do to avoid falling under the affiliate filter

If you have a desire to create several resources of the same subject for your company and promote them to the TOP, then in order to avoid falling under an affiliate, you should take care at the site planning stage.

To do this, it is necessary to ensure the uniqueness of the above indicators.

It should also be understood that the coincidence of indicators does not always entail the imposition of a filter. The risk increases when sites are already well pumped and rank high.

Then Search Engines can start checking for affiliation. And the Competitors will also try and give a signal where they should.

How to get out of this filter

• Change contact details.
• Make content, texts, photographs unique.
• Close domain information.
• Show different phone numbers, it is important that different managers answer the calls.
• You can transfer one of the sites to another hosting.
• Make the maximum number of the above indicators unique.
• After the work done, contact the PS support service with a request to remove the filter.

Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to completely launder a reputation. In some cases, it's easier to transfer content to a different domain name. Of course, with all the unique site metrics.

All good conversions and so that your sites never fall under the search engine filters.

What it is? Let's say you have an online store on 1C-UMI. Someone decides to copy your texts, images and other elements to their resource. Or it will make a very similar resource with similar contact information (or identical). In this case, Yandex may consider your site to be affiliated. That is, a repeating version of a competitive site due to the overlap of elements. If this happens, your site will be downgraded in search results and your competitor will stay afloat.

Learn how to detect and remove an Affiliate Filter overlay in this article.

How Affiliate Filter Works

If you have 5 pages on your site that match the user's request, Yandex will still show only one of them - the most relevant. A similar principle of operation is incorporated in the Affiliate Filter. But there is one significant difference. Documents are grouped not within a single resource, but across all affiliated sites. Let's say there are 2 or 3 more sites similar to your online store. All of them, like yours, have the same element - an order form, price list, or the same products. Yandex will consider that all these sites belong to the same company or person and will leave only one of them in its search results.

This is how Google and Yandex are trying to fight monopoly - so that one person does not create 10 similar sites and occupy all 10 places in the search results.

An affiliate filter can be used not only in Search, but also in the Market and even Direct. At the same time, Yandex denies the existence of such an algorithm. Many SEOs have faced and continue to face this.

The search engine itself can automatically enroll a site in the "affiliates" or manually using the services of an assessor (a person who checks web resources for quality and the presence of any violations).

What an Affiliate Filter Can Trigger

In the list below you will see the reasons why this algorithm can be applied to your site. But remember that most often a combination of factors is needed in order for a resource to be assigned an affiliate status. Due to one thing, the filter is not activated.

Same structure of web pages, duplicate design (very rare).

Matching contact information with contacts on other sites.

Location of sites on the same hosting and under the same IP.

Copied content and HTML code (images, texts, products, plugins, etc.).

Cross-links between resources.

Duplicate company or branch address.

Finding sites in the same Webmaster or Metrica profile.

The same whois information for your domains.

Promotion of sites on the same topics, regions.

Yandex considers some reasons to be more significant than others. For example, if the contacts match, this is almost a 100% guarantee that the Affiliate Filter will be applied. If there are matches only for the prices of goods or CMS, the probability of the algorithm being triggered is minimal.

Signs of overlapping Affiliate filter

If your resource falls under such a filter, its pages begin to drop out of search results. However, they do not lose indexing by the search engine. Usually, the disappearance of visibility concerns all requests on the site, but it so happens that for some keywords it stays on top, and for others it goes into oblivion.

Provided that the relevance of documents on sites is close to identical, Yandex can start ranking them one by one. In this case, the pages of the site either appear in certain positions in the search results, or disappear.

How to calculate an affiliate site

There are several ways to find a resource due to which your site fell under the Affiliate filter. The easiest way is to drive in the contacts published on your website into Yandex search and its reference book, and then look at the results. If, in addition to your resource, there will be another one in it, congratulations - you have found an affiliate.

Another good method is to check the texts from your site for uniqueness. This can be done using the Text.ru service or the Etxt program. When copies are found, you will find sites where duplicate text has been noticed.

The third method is more complicated than the first two, but it can also guarantee higher accuracy. To use it, follow a series of steps:

Write down the search queries for which your resource disappeared from Yandex's visibility or periodically appears and disappears.

Make a list of competing sites from the TOP-10 search results for these keys. To do this, you can use the service "Identify competitors".

Check the current positions on the previously collected queries for your online store and for competitors' sites. Look for a competitor whose position is opposite to yours.

Just in case, you can run the check several times. It is possible that certain positions of keywords will start to appear and disappear, which will be irrefutable evidence that an affiliate site exists.

But even without such "blinking" you can find out the address of the resource, because of which yours was influenced by the algorithm. Just study those competitors whose positions in relation to yours are on the opposite side. For example, your site was in the TOP-10 for the query "buy a Moscow time coat", then it disappeared, and in its place you saw a competitor's resource. If it has multiple matches with your site, then it is the culprit.

How to remove your resource from the Affiliate filter

If you automatically apply the filter, remove any overlaps with other sites you find. If content is duplicated, uniqueize it by rewriting texts, changing or modifying pictures, etc. This will help get rid of the algorithm.

A few days or weeks after you make the necessary changes to your site, the filter will be removed. However, keep in mind that if it was applied manually, then you can get out from under it only in the same way.

Since you cannot find out whether the filter was applied automatically or manually, get ready for a dialogue with Yandex support right away.

Write them a neat letter in which you tell them that you see problems in the ranking of your site, back it up with evidence in the form of screenshots and facts, and ask them to deal with the situation and fix the error. If you know the exact address of the affiliate site, you can point to it and inform that, despite some coincidences, it has nothing to do with you.

We warn you right away that you do not need to use the term “affiliate” when communicating with Yandex support, since they deny the existence of such an algorithm within their system. If you try to put pressure on this, then you should not count on their help. Only a standard unsubscribe will follow, that no problems were noticed and you need to improve the quality of the site.

With careful handling and competent justification, the search engine specialists will analyze the current situation with your web resource and remove the Affiliate filter. Wait for a dramatic improvement in the situation within a few weeks after their positive response that they will conduct a review and make changes to the algorithms.

In order not to fall under this filter, periodically check the positions of your site and, if you notice their loss or "blinking", use the information from this article. Check for affiliates, make corrections if necessary, contact Yandex support and wait for the Affiliate filter to expire.