Affiliated resources. What is an affiliate filter and how to deal with it

23.05.2021

Security

Yandex is trying to fight for the completeness and diversity of its search results not only using the Spectrum technology, but also by imposing an affiliate filter and pessimizing for identical snippets, which will be discussed in detail today. In addition, today we will also talk about the reasons for getting and how to get out of the filters for adult content and aggressive advertising. Hope it will be interesting.

Affiliate filter in Yandex

The essence of the affiliate filter is that sites belonging to the same company are excluded from the results for certain search queries. More precisely, only one of them remains in the SERP. We need this filter for a more or less fair distribution of places in the Top 10, in order to exclude options when one campaign takes more than one place in the search results for one request.

In fact, the idea of "occupation" of Top came to minds of optimizers for a long time, and until the moment when the filter for affiliation appeared, all this was more or less successfully implemented. Those. several sites were created to promote the same group of queries, which actually belonged to the same company and allowed to receive most of the organic traffic available in Yandex for given request(if you managed to occupy the entire Top 3, 5 or even 10).

Some services that one hundred percent allow check affiliation, not at the moment. In principle, the Yandexoids themselves wrote about this:

However, you can still try to do something. Remember, I wrote about that? So, just some of these operators can be used.

If you have any suspicions that your site fell out of the Top because Yandex considered it an affiliate of some other resource, you can check it. To do this, enter in search string such is the request:

Search term ~~ site: URL of the alleged affiliate

By doing this, you sort of exclude from the ranking the resource that Yandex could consider affiliated with your site (think that they belong to the same company). If this is true, then for such a tricky request your resource will have to appear (approximately at the same position). It is possible that at the time of reading this article, this method will not work in full.

Therefore, it makes sense for SEOs who are moving forward on the promotion of other people's sites, it makes sense to ask the client if he has other sites with the same contact information (belonging to the same company), which are promoted, for example, by other Seoshniki. In this case, you can get everything affiliate filter symptoms without even knowing about the high probability of its overlap. By the way, let's take these very symptoms and consider:

A sharp drop in the website for all requests for which it was "visible" in Yandex. A fall can occur immediately by hundreds of positions down (Yandex will not tolerate affiliates in the Top or close to it).
It is logical that the first factor leads to a sharp drop in traffic, i.e. the flow of visitors coming from Yandex.

Therefore, if you do not even track the positions of your site for promoted queries (for example, in or), then you will certainly notice a drop in traffic that will motivate you to look for a reason and you cannot help but notice a failure in all previously occupied positions.

What can serve for Yandex a prerequisite for applying an affiliate filter:

In the article, I mentioned that one of the important factors for a commercial site they check is Contact Information and its completeness. They can even selectively check its validity. So, a clear sign of Yandex affiliation will be the coincidence of phone numbers, addresses, position on the map and other contacts. It is logical to make assumptions that they belong to the same campaign, which means that all but one should be excluded from the ranking.
, then indicate your contact information, which, depending on the settings of your registrar, can be hidden from general access(). If the data was not hidden and all domains were registered to the same person, then for Yandex this will be a very serious reason to apply a filter for affiliation.
Even if you closed your personal ones, the search engine may pay attention to the use of the same domain registrar or to the fact that they were registered at about the same time.
Very often, all affiliates are located by the owners on the same hosting and often even have the same IP address, which again makes it easier for the search engine to identify them. It is clear that this is more convenient, but it will not be difficult for Yandex to reveal your "little trick" either.
Not so obvious, but still suggestive signs of affiliation, may also be:
1. The use of the same structure of data placement on all sites, the approximate coincidence of the nomenclature of goods and services, as well as the use of similar principles for their description.
2. Building websites on the same CMS (engine).
3. Any other little things that are not obvious to you, but which will catch the eye of the "machine", because the likelihood of such a coincidence will not be so high against the background of the "average temperature in the hospital."

And it would be okay if this filter would include sites only from the same subject, which would be quite logical and understandable, because there is clearly “malicious intent” here. But often resources also fall under it, owned by the same company, but made for different topics... There are, after all, diverse companies. But they still have to take into account all of the above and try not to create an excuse for imposing a "you live great" affiliate filter.

Thus, getting out of this filter will be quite painful for many owners of such diverse companies. Therefore, in order to avoid the imposition of this kind of pessimization, it makes sense to create sites for each of the topics that Yandex will not have to link in any way. To do this, you need to:

Each of them indicated unique contact information (phone numbers, addresses, surnames, etc.).
The sites were placed on different hosting or at least on different IP addresses.
It is advisable to register domains for different persons, with different registrars and with time distribution.
Use different site management systems (engines) and try to create different structure and navigation solutions.

Actually, all the same tips will come in handy for those who still decide to deceive the search engine, trying to drive several resources of the same subject to the Top for the necessary queries. But in this case, the criterion for assigning affiliation, it seems to me, will be used more stringent than for sites of different topics. Again, IMHO.

Filter for identical snippets

Let me remind you that snippets are usually called descriptions of sites that a search engine provides in response to a user's request. the search engine chooses at its discretion, and for the same page in the results for different queries, it may differ. The text is taken, of course, from the content of the page (or from it).

As I said, Yandex, like any other a search engine that takes care of the variety and completeness of its search results... Among the main tools of this struggle are:

The "Spectrum" technology, which generates results for ambiguous queries, when it is impossible to clearly understand what exactly the user who typed it wants to see in response. For example, on the request "website promotion" my blog sometimes crawls into the Top 10 precisely because of the spectrum, because the user may be interested not only in getting a promotion service, but also in information about how it is done.
They also try to remove offers of the same goods or services from the same company from the search results. As you understand, this is done by the affiliate filter we have already discussed above.
And, finally, it will not be very cool if there are sites with the same description (albeit not affiliated with each other). Responsible for this, respectively, is the filter applied for the same snippets.

Most often filter for identical snippets superimposed when promoting some specific products(or their positions), the description of which was borrowed by many from one and the same source (well, what is there to invent, especially if there are tens or even hundreds of thousands of goods). Those. the filter is applied when a non-unique description of the product is included in the snippet and your site is not recognized by Yandex as the author of this content (that is). In fact, your sites in the SERP are glued to whoever the search considers the author.

Sometimes, when viewing such results, you can see an inscription at the bottom saying that too similar answers have been excluded from the search results. To see the full output without applying this filter, you can click on the inscription "Show everything without exception" located below, or you can scroll the URL in the address bar to the right to the end and add the operator "& rd = 0" there:

The main symptom of applying this filter is the loss of positions for one or several queries (most often, commodity ones). What should be done, to get out of the filter for identical snippets:

We are looking for a site in the search results that has a snippet that matches yours (pasting them with "& rd = 0"), after which we try to rewrite our snippet. That is, we look in the text for the phrase that Yandex displays in the search results, and rewrite it, but so that it does not lose its attractiveness, because this text will actually be your free ad posted on Yandex.
Just in case, in the meta description tag, we replace the non-unique (or absent) description with something attractive using keywords, but by no means spammy. For some requests, the snippet can be generated based on the description, if available.
If you have an online store and you use non-unique descriptions in product cards (taken from other sites), then be sure to take care of their uniqueness. Add, for example, at the beginning of the product card several unique passages mentioning the keywords by which you plan to promote. Some of this fragment can be taken by a search engine to form a snippet.
If you have any unique selling proposition, then mention it in the product cards.

It is possible that the product descriptions you have rewritten will not give a tangible increase in positions (it all depends on your talent as a copywriter and optimizer), but this should definitely reduce the likelihood of falling under the filter for non-unique snippets. Yes, and by the way, this can also protect against the Google filter called Panda to some extent.

Yandex filter for adult content

Search engines try to protect users from frivolous sites when answering those queries that do not unequivocally indicate the user's desire to see this very "adult" content. That is, such sites simply do not participate in the search for ordinary queries.

Quite often white and fluffy sites fall under this filter, which is called "without malice" (without having as such content "for adults" or links to it leading). For example, such information can be found by search engines in advertisements displayed on your resource. And it may even be contextual advertising... It was rather unusual at one time to read about someone's correspondence with Yandex regarding the imposition of this filter, when as a result it turned out that the cause was advertising blocks from the Yandex network itself (YAN).

As a result of applying this filter, your site may completely disappear from regular search results (except for "adult" queries), which is very sad. The main sign of this kind of pessimization can be a sharp drop in traffic from Yandex (several times), while the traffic from Google is fully preserved.

What can Cause a filter for adult content:

Deliberately or unintentionally (for example, with insufficiently strict moderation of forum posts or blog comments) posting information "for adults" on a regular site.
Already mentioned ad units with frivolous content or questionable ones also count towards partnership programs posted on your resource.
And also links to adult sites left by you or someone else. In principle, one such link will be enough to get under the filter for adult content. Bloggers should pay special attention to this, because often commentators are allowed to leave the URL of their site, which may well lead you “under the monastery”.

Methods for exiting from under this filter Yandex results from the reasons causing it:

Remove all frivolous content, if any (articles, images, comments, links, etc.).
Remove all ads in which this kind of content may appear. You don't have to remove it, but just turn off "adult advertising", as, for example, you can do it in advertising network Yandex.
After you have done all this, you will need to contact the technical support of this search engine (read about it) and wait for a response from it. If claims about adult content still remain, then ask Platon Shchukin to show an example of those pages or links that arouse criticism from the search engine.

If everything is fine, then your traffic from Yandex should be restored.

Filter for aggressive ads

Yandex also fights for the purity of the search results on the side of the sites themselves, throwing out or lowering in the search results those of them that are placed by popunders, clickanders, teasers with shock ads and other types of obtrusive-aggressive advertising, for example, occupying the entire screen or blocking page views. As a result, the visitor is forced to wait or look for a way to bypass the advertising information imposed on him. According to the search engine, such “radishes” have no place in the Top, because they discredit its work.

A sign of the imposition of such a filter can be a drop out of the Top 10 for promoted queries (especially for highly competitive ones). Exit methods in this case, the traditional:

That's all for today. Let's talk about Yandex filters for cheating behavioral and incorrect work with links in the very near future. stay in touch so you don't miss anything.

Good luck to you! See you soon on the pages of the blog site

Signs of site affiliation:

Same phone numbers

A very powerful argument to send a site under the filter is that one company owns several sites. However, you can register additional phone numbers for posting on other sites.

Identical addresses

If the sites match the street, house number, office number, and even the subject, then getting under the filter is a matter of time. To prevent this from happening, you should indicate different addresses on the sites.

Same E-mail

To solve the problem in this case is very simple - you need to register a separate mail for each site.

Domain owner

If the search results contain sites with domains registered to the same person, there is a certain risk of being sanctioned. You can get out of the situation quite easily - either register the domain of the second site to another person, or close the data on the owner of the domain name in the registrar.

Similar structure

A rather indirect sign, but it is also taken into account. If two sites have the same URL structure and name, it is not only noticeable to users, but also to search engines.

Similar design

This is a more obvious sign. If the logo, color schemes, background and other design attributes are the same, it is worth urgently correcting this misunderstanding.

Company name, similar domain names

The most common and most ridiculous mistake of most owners. Solving it, as you understand, is not so difficult - you can change the name of the company. Also, do not use the company name when registering a domain.

Server IP, hosting

It is desirable that the sites are located on different servers and hosting.

Content, same goods or services

If your sites sell the same products at the same prices and with similar conditions, this will definitely raise suspicion.

In what cases are sites of the same owner not covered by this filter?

What if you have already been hit by the filter?

Eliminate all signs of affiliation, show that these sites belong to different owners.
Close one of the sites in robots.txt from indexing. You can also merge domains and make a 301 redirect.

How to check if a site has been hit by an affiliate filter?

As a rule, the filter is applied to sites optimized for one search query. If one of the sites falls under the filter, it abruptly loses its position in the search results for queries common with other affiliates and may completely drop out of the index. At the same time, another resource affiliated with it remains in the search results.

To avoid such consequences, it is better to conduct an analysis in advance and find out if there are sites similar to yours in the index of search engines. This is especially true for SEO-optimizers, to whom clients' websites come for promotion. Very often it turns out that customers have several resources of the same subject or, even worse, identical sites available under different domain names.

How to quickly find an affiliate?

Labrika will help you to do this - based on the analysis of contact information posted on the site, the service provides information about which other resources on the Internet have the same addresses, phone numbers, and mail. Using special algorithms, Labrika identifies "explicit" and "presumptive" affiliates.

I continue to publish materials based on my speech at SEOConference 2015. In this article, we will consider 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, only one of the sites is displayed in the search results for the same query.

Excerpt from Yandex.Webmaster help:

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

Excerpt from Search Club:

One of the general principles of building high-quality SERPs 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 a general case of the absence of a site in the search for any query at the same time as 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 any particular request 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 indexed well and is in search in accordance with its relevance to user queries. 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., with 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 cannot comment on the "affiliation" of the sites you indicated, we do not operate with similar concepts.

Such "excuses", in my opinion, once again demonstrate that Platonians do not see everything that is happening 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 such a request, then the sites are affiliates. If both sites are searched, then they are not affiliated.

A few comments on the request at once:

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, both sites are displayed:

Regarding the second case when you do not 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" from the results of each domain to the original request, 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 🙂

It's no secret that some companies create and promote several sites at once with their goods and services. The main goal of creating copies of a site is the desire of site owners to take several positions in the TOP 10 at once for the same queries in order to get as many customers as possible and, as a result, increase sales. That is, the fewer competitors in the search results, the more income the sites will bring.

Everything would be fine and very simple if Yandex followed the same logic. However, the search engine perceives such actions on the part of site owners in a completely different way - Yandex recognizes such a group of sites. affiliates and applies sanctions to them.
In this article, I will explain the main reasons for applying an affiliate filter and how to avoid it.

For reference

Affiliates (from the English affiliate, affiliate) - a group of sites in the same subject, most often belonging to the same company and practically do not differ from each other in both information and benefits for the visitor.

An affiliate filter is a reaction of search engines, in particular Yandex, to the appearance of a large number (2 or more) affiliated resources, the sole purpose of which is to flood the search results.

Why a site might be filtered

Most often, various online stores fall under the affiliate filter. However, entertainment and information resources may also be subject to sanctions if they have multiple copies. Search engines can calculate an affiliate based on many factors, the most common of which are:

Now, let's take a closer look at each of the factors:

1. Domain owner
When domains are registered for one person (one organization), it is quite easy to identify the relationship between several sites. Information about the domain owner can be established on any part of whois: name, e-mail, phone.

2. Hosting and site server
When identical sites are hosted on the same hosting or server, this is an indication to search engines that the sites belong to the same owner.

3. Contacts and company name
If the sites contain only one contact information (company name, address, phone or e-mail) - this is a clear sign of their belonging to one person. There are also cases where contact details are combined. For example, on one site the phone number of the company is indicated, and on the other - the address or a call forwarding from different numbers to the same company is set.

4. Domain and logo
Often, a group of sites has very similar addresses, differing in domain zone (site.ru and site.com) or name (site.ru and site-sale.ru). This factor should be taken into account in conjunction with the rest of the signs.
Also, a common mistake is a complete match of the logo or a similar design.

5. Content
If the site is a copy of another site or contains most of the information from another resource, then you can reasonably assume that they belong to the same company. Sites may have the same product catalogs (or most of them are similar), many or all products have the same prices, product descriptions (or even SKUs), etc. - this is clearly suspicious and may serve as a reason to apply a filter.

6. Site structure
It is very common, especially in online stores, that the structure of the store, page addresses, texts are simply copied to another site / sites. Only the domain, hosting or a few texts for the main sections differ on these sites.

7. Same design
Cases when the owner of the resource does not even change the design when creating copies of the site are quite rare, but nevertheless there is such a thing. Therefore, the design of sites should differ, at least in styles, and ideally completely.
I would like to note that the greatest probability of the application of sanctions is a combination of several signs at once, but each of them individually can serve as the reason for the imposition of the filter of affiliates.

Are the main site and subdomain also affiliates?

Large companies with many branches in Russia very often create subdomains on the main site and then promote them in a large number of regions. In this case, it turns out that subdomains can also be recognized by affiliates?
In this case, the search engine will not consider such subdomains as affiliates and will not impose sanctions. But the owner needs to tell Yandex that these sites belong to a specific region:

you need to add the name of the corresponding city to the subdomain address. An example is the site homsbox.ru, for Voronezh the regional site address will be voronezh.homsbox.ru, for Lipetsk - lipetsk.homsbox.ru, etc .;
to correctly take into account the regionality of a subdomain, you must assign it a region in Yandex.Webmaster and a contact address in Yandex.Directory;
the subdomain should contain useful information for visitors to the region for which it was created;
regional subdomains must be included in the navigation of the main site so that the user can navigate from the home page of the site to the page related to his region.

Filter Overlay Signs

If, for some queries, only one site from the group began to be displayed in the TOP, and the positions of the rest fell below the TOP 100 or were completely excluded from the search results, then Yandex recognized these sites as affiliates and imposed sanctions. The resource, which retained its position, was recognized by the search engine as more relevant than other copies. It is impossible to determine which resource will remain in the search results and which will fall under the filter - this is a random search engine's choice. But an older, more established site has a much better chance of staying in search results. It is also worth noting that for non-overlapping queries, both sites will be shown in the SERP.

How to identify an affiliate

You can try to identify affiliates manually using certain queries in Yandex. There are many examples of such requests on forums and specialized resources. However, most of them no longer work, and the performance and reliability of others is a big question.
Yandex representatives officially declare that it is impossible to view the list of sites that, for some reason, were not included in the search results for a specific query.
Output
If you are going to create one or more copies of the site, before carrying out their internal optimization and starting promotion, make sure that all possible reasons for the sites' affiliation have been eliminated. Better yet, don't create clones. Sites that do not violate the requirements of search engines are not afraid of sanctions.