Another Search Engine Question

[SportsInvestor]

ok, i have the #1 spot on yahoo for the key words sports investing. but if you search for the same words on google my website comes up, but it's not my web address. i know it's an affiliate of mine, which is ok, but why does it have my key words and quote my content and show another web address? my web address is SportsInvestingGuide.com, but this entry has an address of http://mambo.webraydian.com/component/option,com_clickbank/id,419/Outbound,1/


How or why is this done?

[robinev]

What you call the "affiliate's" page appears to be what Google would call a doorway page. The url you posted does nothing more than bounce a user (or, possibly, a search engine) off to your primary page.

Google tries not to list duplicate pages. Either your primary url or the long url that you posted would be considered a duplicate and would therefore be excluded from their index.

I'm not sure there is anything you could do about it except maybe wait and hope that a later crawl/indexing tosses out the affiliate site rather than your primary site. It's probably not wise to do anything that might call this situation to their attention since the techniques used here appear to violate Google's terms of service.

[SportsInvestor]

if it violates the terms, will that penalize me? it's not my fault. I really don't care how people get to my site, so i won't say a word. but i also don't want to get penalized for something i didn't do and had no control over.

[robinev]

I'm not sure, but I kind of doubt that there would be an actual penalty unless you have too many of these doorway pages pointing to your site.

But then, that whole subject of Google penalties is full of all kinds of myths and superstition.