Author: Mark Fletcher

Across at our Find It online classifieds business we have introduced fast ads – advertisers can create an ad in seconds. We’ve done this based on feedbck from newsagents and others using the site.

My blog post yesterday about how an affiliate marketing campaign run by Fairfax Digital chasing traffic for their RSVP site caused a stir.

Crikey.com.au picked up the story for their daily email bulletin and their website.

It was fascinating watching the quick disassembling of the RSVP affiliate campaign. It’s not easy and during the day one could see the retreat. The Google cache remains the only live online evidence I suspect that other affiliate campaigns purchased by Fairfax Digital were disassembled too as a result of our outing this affiliate marketing practice by Fairfax.

I received several calls including one from the CEO of Commission Monster. He said that what I reported was the action of a rogue affiliate, possible someone looking to commercially harm Commission Monster, and that as soon as they discovered this they took the campaign down. I don’t know if it was the action of a rogue affiliate and frankly I don’t care. Given the thousands of dollars Fairfax would have running in its RSVP affiliate campaigns with Commission Monster, both companies ought to know when a ‘rogue affiliate’ is at work or not. If they were concerned about such things they would have checks and balances in place to ensure that the scam I outed yesterday did not continue beyond a day. That it was running for at least two months demonstrates to the cynic in me that they were happy to turn a blind eye.

I suspect that RSVP suffers from a significant churn – hence the need for even dubious campaigns such as affiliate campaigns. Fairfax would know something about churns from their newspaper experience. They would also know about the need to engage in practices acceptable to the Audit Bureau. The scams used in some affiliate marketing campaigns ought to be enough to scare off any respectable company regardless of the new traffic generated.

It will be interesting to see how this issue plays out and whether I hear anything from Fairfax Digital.

Fairfax Digital, the owner of RSVP, the biggest online dating site in Australia, seems to be using dubious SEO tactics to manipulate Google search results to attract more traffic to its site.

Using Hitwise data we can see that RSVP attracted, on average, 3.3 million visits a month over December 2006 and January 2007. Our 3loves site attracted on average 49,778 visits a month over the same two months while all online dating sites attracted on average 20.79 million visits a month. RSVP has 15.8% share of traffic in the online dating category. We have 1.5% of RSVPs traffic.

These stats make the RSVP behaviour all the more curious. Here’s what we know so far.

Fairfax Digital uses an organisation called Commission Monster to promote RSVP and, we suspect, other Fairfax Digital sites. We discovered this by tracking redirection from a Google search results link through to where we actually ended up. We were taken through Commission Monster on the way to the page we were seeking through Google.

Someone, we suspect Commission Monster, has created a page which redirects traffic to RSVP when they have been searching for 3LOVES. This is a violation of Google rules. Click here to see what Google thinks is at the page. This is what the Google spider cached on January 30 this year. Curiously, the page has been modified in the last 24 hours, since we first raised this issue, and is now displaying an error.

Until yesterday, the page seemed to check where the click came from and if it was not Google, the browser redirected to RSVP. We know from Google results and what’s in their cache that the Google spider was not redirected.

Here is the Google cache for the page as captured by us today. This is evidence of misbehavior. Fairfax / RSVP actions over the last 24 hours show they know they have been caught out. Expect the Google cached page to change as they try and remove traces of their Google search results manipulation.

That Fairfax and or their representatives have changed the redirect page in the last 24 hours is proof to us that they know they have done something wrong.

Even though it does not actually exist. Browsers clicking on the Google search results are taken through what is called a 302 redirect to RSVP. Whoever set this up did so to take people searching for 3LOVES to RSVP.

Whoever has done this has gone to considerable lengths to try and trick the Google spider. BMW did something similar and were removed from Google for a time as a result. Details of what BMW did and the consequences can be read here. Google gave BMW a pagerank 0 penalty, meaning that they lose all relevancy in Google searches. It’s kind of like being sent to Siberia in Winter for a while. Google takes attempts to manipulate search results very seriously as the purity of results is crucial to their credibility and business model.

We know from our research that Fairfax Digital is not only targeting our 3LOVES site in this way. We have plenty of other dating site names being used to drive traffic to RSVP in this way. Here is the cached page setup for Adultmatchmaker.

We have reported the matter to Google. They came back to us quickly and have sought additional information which we are providing.

Google’s webmaster guidelines cover this issue. Specifically, Google advises webmasters: Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects. They go on to say: If a site doesn’t meet our quality guidelines, it may be blocked from the index. This is why we are putting it to Google that RSVP is removed from the Google index.

3LOVES is a tiny free online dating site. We’re new, we’re under-resourced and we are filling a need in the community. People are spending too much chasing love online. Tens of millions of dollars are spent each year by Australians chasing love and romance online. If we can save even a fraction o that for people to use elsewhere in their lives than our mission will be accomplished.

The folks at Fairfax Digital and RSVP ought to get a grip and focus on their offering rather than try and con people searching for us into visiting their RSVP site.

3loves is part of an online classifieds offering we are launching with newsagents as our retail partners.

Do a Google search for our startup free online dating site, 3loves, and this comes up in the results.

If you click on the link it takes you to RSVP. This is very clever Search Engine Optimisation by Fairfax Digital, the owners of RSVP and reflects a manipulation of Google search results. In the bricks and mortar world this could be considered passing off your product as something else to get a prospect interested.

I don’t know why Fairfax would go to so much trouble, we are barely an ant to their gigantic online dating site. Maybe it has something to do with RSVP costing around $30 a month for members to do what they can do at 3loves for free. Whatever the reason, Fairfax ought to stop manipulating Google search results as it’s scams like this which will lead to distrust.

People using Google and other search engines need to be able to trust search results and games like those played by Fairfax dilute that trust. Someone searching for 3loves wants to find entries which refer to 3loves, not entries created solely to siphon this traffic off to a website which has no relationship at all with 3loves.

There are enough scammers in the online dating world already. I wold have thought Fairfax too successful to engage in these games.

3loves is a social media site launched to support our Find It online classifieds business – a online model we are launching with newsagents.