URL with affiliate ID won't stop outranking our homepage. Time for nuclear option?
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We have affiliate links applied to our index URL - https://playon.co - which are not picked up as a duplicate URLs by Google.
We've applied a canonical URL, but our homepage is a 301 redirect to a page with a language parameter.
So what happens is:
- https://playon.co/ goes to https://playon.co/en
- Affiliate links such as https://playon.co/#/?affiliate_token=1390448caccb7d go to https://playon.co/en#/?affiliate_token=1390448caccb7d
This gets picked up as rel="canonical" href="https://playon.co/en" which I assumed marked it as a non-canonical page. Nonetheless, we keep seeing this affiliate "page" ranking - even above our own homepage for some terms.
Worse, the affiliate URL also contains old cached information of the page. I don't even see how these SERP results should exist, because the affiliate link just ends up at the homepage (https://playon.co/en)
My questions:
- What can we do to remove these affiliate URL versions of our homepage from being ranked?
- Google doesn't see anything after the hash in the indexed affiliate URLs. If we were to no-index our index URL (https://playon.co/) to completely remove the affiliates links, would our canonical version (https://playon.co/en) assume the top listing, or will we have effectively nuked our entire site?
Appreciate any help.
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The problem with removing these URLs is Google/Webmaster Tools doesn't read anything beyond the hash.
Specifically - requesting that https://playon.co/#/?affiliate_token=04d234f75b1d74 be hidden removed from the index + cache is then processed simply as https://playon.co being removed.
Again - https://playon.co is just a redirect, it is not the actual homepage. But will no-indexing https://playon.co prevent https://playon.co/en from ranking, which is the URL we need to be recognized as the homepage?
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Thanks for following up. Sorry for the confusion.
Yes, the "affiliate-tagged version of our homepage" is outranking the canonical at times. This is resulting in organic, branded traffic from Google being credited to an affiliate.
Just as maddening is that said "affiliate-tagged version of our homepage" doesn't even exist. Google seems to refuse to let go of an old, cached version of our homepage content.
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Thanks. Both the affiliate token and # parameters have been set in Webmaster Tools, but had no effect.
To clarify - are you saying the "nuclear option" is on the table?
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