Advertisers pretending to be affiliates to get inward links

[footballaffiliate]

Sure this has been discussed before, but here's an example of a site that's pretending to be an affiliate, but is actually owned by the casino operator. They do this to look like they've got loads of inward links and therefore gain Google popularity:
Casinoreef.com.au - Your Australian online casino guide

If you check out the registrant of this domain they're a spurious unidentifiable Limited company in Australia. However, a bit more digging will show you that they run a lot of affiliate sites and operate out of Tel Aviv in promoting their own casinos.

Anyone know how you report these spoofers to Google? They're effectively hijacking your affiliate traffic.

 

[lalalaenhund]

What difference does it make if it's owned by the operator? Would you care if it was a legit affiliate site?

My advice is stop sabotaging your competition and just focus on your own sites. Even if you manage to remove 1 site from the serps, another one will take its place if your site is too weak.

 

[footballaffiliate]

What difference does it make if it's owned by the operator? Would you care if it was a legit affiliate site?

My advice is stop sabotaging your competition and just focus on your own sites. Even if you manage to remove 1 site from the serps, another one will take its place if your site is too weak.

It's not just one site - what I'm trying to get across is that this is a massive trend in the affiliate industry. Perhaps you're an operator yourself, but operators now run at least half, if not more, of what look like affiliate sites out there. They're swamping Google with sites that link to them to make themselves look popular and gain SERPs. So, in a short time if you're targeted on your keywords you could go from first page to 10th page and lose your whole traffic.

 

[lalalaenhund]

It's not just one site - what I'm trying to get across is that this is a massive trend in the affiliate industry. Perhaps you're an operator yourself, but operators now run at least half, if not more, of what look like affiliate sites out there. They're swamping Google with sites that link to them to make themselves look popular and gain SERPs. So, in a short time if you're targeted on your keywords you could go from first page to 10th page and lose your whole traffic.

That's no different than a competing affiliate whose using a blog network to rank his sites. If you go from the 1st to the 10th page because of that, your sites aren't strong enough. My point is that competition is only going to get tougher in this industry and negative SEO/sabotaging isn't a very good long term tactic. Instead you could learn from your competition and copy what they're doing right.

And no, I'm not an operator, just an affiliate, at least for now

 

[footballaffiliate]

That's no different than a competing affiliate whose using a blog network to rank his sites. If you go from the 1st to the 10th page because of that, your sites aren't strong enough. My point is that competition is only going to get tougher in this industry and negative SEO/sabotaging isn't a very good long term tactic. Instead you could learn from your competition and copy what they're doing right.

And no, I'm not an operator, just an affiliate, at least for now

I am better than all my competition - I rank #1 on many terms I just don't like dodgy operators (almost exclusively in Israel coincidentally - maybe because if you tried this in the UK you'd get pulled up by the authorities) trying to black hat their way in - agree with all your points though - you have to compete with whoever out there competes with you. Dodgy SEO methods always get routed out by Google though. We're in it for the long term, and have been successful for 10+ years by building sustainable websites, good content, not trying to fool Google with the latest SEO fads that they eventually hammer you for.

I could see some operators being sandboxed by Google eventually for practices like this. Especially with the US laws opening up and inevitably Google getting into gambling itself, even though it thinks it's purer than pure at the moment! Money talks.