Hi All,
The issue is that SE bots/spiders are crawling affiliate sites, following the affiliate link to the casino (counts as a click) then because we do query string tracking the affiliate id is passed to the download page and the bot crawls that too showing a started download. Hence affiliates seeing 100 downloads and no registrations/players.
If you test with a human being you will see that the tracking works fine and that you are getting full credit as you should.
ooooo, light blub goes on…
I don’t know this didn’t why occur to me before … add
rel=”nofollow”
as an attribute to the anchor tag of your given linking code… so that would be something like:
[a href=”http://www.cr_site.com/referrral.asp?aff_id=affXXXX” rel=”nofollow”]anchor text[/a]
That should actually tell google, yahoo!, msn to NOT follow the link (was initially supported to stop blog spammers or other public comment style pages). Keep in mind this wont’ stop the link from working or affect you sending traffic from HUMANS … just bots (bots that obey, that is. The big 3 do).
Try this out and see if it does the trick … please post your results here.
Obviously keep a note on the day you started linking this way so we can compare… thanks guys!