New Google META Tag Against Gray Hat Affiliates

Jill Whalen from Highrankings.com reported last Wednesday that Google announced at the SEMNE event in Rhode Island the introduction of a new HTML META tag, which could be interesting for affiliate marketers. She wrote:

Google is coming out with a new tag called “unavailable_after” which will allow people to tell Google when a particular page will no longer be available for crawling. For instance, if you have a special offer on your site that expires on a particular date, you might want to use the unavailable_after tag to let Google know when to stop indexing it. Or perhaps you write articles that are free for a particular amount of time, but then get moved to a paid-subscription area of your site. Unavailable_after is the tag for you!

I had not articles in mind when I read this, but coupon offers.
It is no secret that some affiliates abuse the fact that a merchant has coupons occasionally to create pages with coupons for that merchant, which will have the words coupon and coupons plaster all over them, regardless if the merchant has a coupon available or not.

Their argument is that the merchant has coupons from time to time and that this is the page where people can find them. That there are no coupons most of the times is not their fault. Shoppers who enter “merchant name + coupon” in Google or other search engines find those pages (which rank usually very high) and visit them in the hope to find a current coupon only to find out that there is none.

Most click on some elusive specials link that have the affiliate ID encoded to the merchant site only to find out that there is not much special stuff going on at the merchant site. Customers who are ready to buy will buy what they wanted anyway, because they know that they will not pay too much, because there is no coupon code that would have provided a discount for their order.

Now do merchants and affiliate managers a strategic weapon in their hands against this form of traffic diversion. This is not a tool for everyone. Merchants who have constantly coupons flying around can’t do much with it. Merchants who only have coupons occasionally on the other hand, could use the tag to their advantage.

An example: A merchant could adjust his terms of service to restrict the usage of the word “coupon” or “coupons” in combination with their brand in the same context, especially on special pages that are optimized for this keyword combination. The popular and often permanently available “free shipping” promotions and clearance sales must be excluded from this restriction of course; their use is legit.

In order for affiliates to use the words together on special designed “promotion and coupons pages”, are affiliates required to utilize this new META tag with the coupon expiration date as value for the “unavailable_after” tag. If they want to promote ongoing promotions and coupons, special pages for the time-limited coupons might be required by the affiliate in order to be able to promote the coupons.

The guideline should not be phrased to strongly, because it will probably upset affiliates who are doing nothing wrong as well. You might just want to reserve the right to request the use of the META tag from individual affiliates where you think that they meet the criteria, which I outlined before.

Having made my own experiences with this issue, I think that this META tag could become another tool for AMs and merchants to keep some of the “gray hat” affiliates a bit whiter. As with all tools, only the proper usage will be beneficial. A tool used incorrectly can cause more damage than help.

The META tag support is not live yet from what I can tell, so there is enough time to kick the ideas around and act once it is supported and used by Google.