Focal Click Banners - Watch Out!

[Guard Dog]

Hey everyone,

If you are updating your sites with Focal Click's casinos (CS Casino, Omni Casino, or Sun Poker), you might want to change the banner code. They are basically stuffing your site with spammy links and it is not appreciated (at least I don't care for it).

Here is an example:

[summary]

<a target="_blank" href="http://www.cscasino.com/index.asp?ID=229976&PID=10881" title="Online Casinos"><img src="http://www.focalclick.com/cgi-bin/focalimage.exe?10881" border="0" width="468" height="60" alt="Online Casinos" title="Online Casinos" title="Online Casinos"></a><br/><a href="http://www.cscasino.com/index.asp?ID=229976&PID=10881">Online Casinos</a>

[/summary]

You can see that the image tag has 2 title tags and an alt tag that says 'Online Casinos'. Additionally, it places a link UNDER the banner with the same text as anchor text.

Bad...bad...bad... This is NOT a big help to your site. It only helps them!

 

[Engineer]

Thanks for bringing this to everyone's attention. It sucks when programs try to compete with their own affiliates in the SERPS.

Instead of using what they give you, affiliates should make sure to delete all of the "alt" and "title" tags. You should also add the rel="nofollow" attribute to ALL of your affiliate links, to prevent PR from being passed to the casino website.

Instead of using the link code they provide you, use these instead:

Banner link:

<a target="_blank" href="http://www.cscasino.com/index.asp?ID=229976&PID=10881" rel="nofollow"><img src="http://www.focalclick.com/cgi-bin/focalimage.exe?10881" border="0" width="468" height="60"></a>

Text link:

<a href="http://www.cscasino.com/index.asp?ID=229976&PID=10881" rel="nofollow">CS Casino</a>

 

[Simmo!]

Like Engineer says, rel=nofollow is what I would use, or rel=external nofollow - either or. Although I tend to keep all my affiliate links in a text file and use a PHP redirect script which is also a lot easier to maintain.

However, playing devil's advocate for a second, linking out to authority sites can actually benefit you, so in some instances, it might actually be beneficial to link to high ranking casinos. In which case, make sure the anchor/title text is relevant to the search term they rank high for. Best do this on search terms you don't compete with directly too.

Swings and roundabouts.

 

[dominique]

I host all banners myself and nofollow all the aff links.

Quite a few programs sneek in tags these days.

 

[Guard Dog]

Quite a few programs sneek in tags these days.

I have noticed very few others with such a spammy link, though. With 2 title tags and an alt tag the same, that shows the search engines that you are keyword stuffing.

I understand a program wanting to use links for SEO purposes, I just don't understand the spammy portion of it.

We should all be fairly diligent at looking closely to what the programs give us for HTML, though. Not just for Focal, but for all affiliate programs.