There are dozens of posts from people complaining that certain voucher sites have made a page about their site, when there are no discount codes available. I don't think anyone can make the argument that its good for the user experience, or good for the affiliate scene as a whole. The tactics of kidnapping your traffic, showing them fake vouchers, putting them through deliberately slow redirects, or lying and saying your store might be closed are extremely sleazy and unhelpful.
We run discountvouchers.org and we want to make some changes to work with website owners, rather than against them. I appreciate a lot of website owners wish voucher sites never existed at all, but they do and they are not going anywhere so this issue just needs to be dealt with in the best way possible. Its unavoidable that people are going to be searching for "your brand discount codes", or land on a fake voucher page when they are simply searching for something related to your brand that never even mentioned codes in the first place.
We want to help businesses grow, we are not going into the racketeering business of kidnapping your traffic, holding it to ransom and selling it to a competitor if you don't pay the extortion fees.
From today, we are allowing website owners claim their own page on discountvouchers.org if it has already been created, or create their own page there if it hasn't. We will give these page owners full control over it. They will have a username/password and can edit their own store description, add special offers, deals and voucher codes if they have them. If you want to claim your page but never update it, thats fine. There will be a single, generic "offer" listed that doesn't expire saying "visit {merchantname} for great offers today. You can see a sample "claimed" page here. There will be absolutely no cost to claim or update your page.
If you do not have voucher codes, you can select an option saying you never have them from within your login. This will display the following image on your store page:
If you do at any point issue voucher codes, they will see this:
If a user is already at the point where they are searching for "your brand discount codes" when you do not issue any, there are two outcomes currently:
* They land on a site pretending to have voucher codes, they are then sent to your site (with you probably paying commission) and end up unhappy that a fake voucher never worked
* They are sold on to one of your competitors instead, and you lose the sale
If you have claimed your page on discountvouchers.org, the page title on it will be altered to something like "Brand Name Discount Codes - Official Page/Statement/Anything of your choice".
The text on this page is 100% yours to edit and do with as you please. If you want to add text links pointing to your own site, thats fine. All we need from you is that you write at least 1 paragraph that is unique. If you want to copy/paste anything else from your own site, you can. If you want to write a page saying why you don't issue voucher codes at all, you are completely free to do so.
Given that this will be an "official" page in the search results, the clickthrough rate should be high. Once people land there and see that you don't actually have any codes, their search for them will end. This prevents them falling into the trap of going to a fake voucher page, never to be seen again.
Once they are on the discountvouchers.org hosted page, if they click through to your site this will be completely without monetization. I am not interested in trying to hold a small business hostage over their own visitors. If they want to go to your site, they can go to your site and 100% of the profits are yours. There will be no affiliate links on your merchant claimed page. We will not have any deliberately slow redirects, we won't have any popups, and we won't add images like this one below pretending to be your mailing list:
If you check one of our current standard pages, for example click here for Comet, you will see there are both "recent discounts" and "newest merchants" in the sidebar. Both of these features have been removed from merchant claimed pages. If someone is on your claimed page, they will not be able to see any "related" merchants, or anything that isn't directly to do with your store. We are deliberately setting these pages up in a format that will be very close to eliminating leaking the visitors to any other page.
If you decide what we are offering is a good fit for you, you can sign up and have your page immediately by going here. Again, please remember this page is completely free. If at any time, for any reason, you no longer want it to be an officially claimed page, you can deactivate it and all of features I have listed above will be instantly removed.
We will make absolutely zero commission from these pages, so bearing that in mind and the fact our site still needs to make at least some money, this is going to be limited to smaller sites only. Please don't try and claim a PC World or a Dell page as it will not be approved
We're happy to listen to feedback and make reasonable changes to how this works. We tested this privately in Beta already, and from feedback there we removed the "recent offers" from claimed pages. We also made the choice of images to make perfectly clear that some sites have no voucher codes, so we are here to listen to what site owners want, and anything within reason will be accommodated. Any questions can either be posted here, pm'd to me, or emailed on lee @ use my domain here .org.
If you already have 1 or more "discount code" pages listed on a voucher website, perhaps you need to look at that page and compare it to what we are offering here, and decide which of them you would rather have your customers on. If pages with all the content deliberately removed or pages pretending to be your mailing list are harming your online marketing efforts, we can help. We already rank top 10 for more than 900 different "BrandName discount codes" so if you want us to help stem the damage from other people ranking for your brand with fake offers (or blank pages), you can go here and claim your page.
Again, if you have any questions, feedback or improvements I would love to hear from you, either here or privately.
Thanks
We run discountvouchers.org and we want to make some changes to work with website owners, rather than against them. I appreciate a lot of website owners wish voucher sites never existed at all, but they do and they are not going anywhere so this issue just needs to be dealt with in the best way possible. Its unavoidable that people are going to be searching for "your brand discount codes", or land on a fake voucher page when they are simply searching for something related to your brand that never even mentioned codes in the first place.
We want to help businesses grow, we are not going into the racketeering business of kidnapping your traffic, holding it to ransom and selling it to a competitor if you don't pay the extortion fees.
From today, we are allowing website owners claim their own page on discountvouchers.org if it has already been created, or create their own page there if it hasn't. We will give these page owners full control over it. They will have a username/password and can edit their own store description, add special offers, deals and voucher codes if they have them. If you want to claim your page but never update it, thats fine. There will be a single, generic "offer" listed that doesn't expire saying "visit {merchantname} for great offers today. You can see a sample "claimed" page here. There will be absolutely no cost to claim or update your page.
If you do not have voucher codes, you can select an option saying you never have them from within your login. This will display the following image on your store page:
If you do at any point issue voucher codes, they will see this:
If a user is already at the point where they are searching for "your brand discount codes" when you do not issue any, there are two outcomes currently:
* They land on a site pretending to have voucher codes, they are then sent to your site (with you probably paying commission) and end up unhappy that a fake voucher never worked
* They are sold on to one of your competitors instead, and you lose the sale
If you have claimed your page on discountvouchers.org, the page title on it will be altered to something like "Brand Name Discount Codes - Official Page/Statement/Anything of your choice".
The text on this page is 100% yours to edit and do with as you please. If you want to add text links pointing to your own site, thats fine. All we need from you is that you write at least 1 paragraph that is unique. If you want to copy/paste anything else from your own site, you can. If you want to write a page saying why you don't issue voucher codes at all, you are completely free to do so.
Given that this will be an "official" page in the search results, the clickthrough rate should be high. Once people land there and see that you don't actually have any codes, their search for them will end. This prevents them falling into the trap of going to a fake voucher page, never to be seen again.
Once they are on the discountvouchers.org hosted page, if they click through to your site this will be completely without monetization. I am not interested in trying to hold a small business hostage over their own visitors. If they want to go to your site, they can go to your site and 100% of the profits are yours. There will be no affiliate links on your merchant claimed page. We will not have any deliberately slow redirects, we won't have any popups, and we won't add images like this one below pretending to be your mailing list:
If you check one of our current standard pages, for example click here for Comet, you will see there are both "recent discounts" and "newest merchants" in the sidebar. Both of these features have been removed from merchant claimed pages. If someone is on your claimed page, they will not be able to see any "related" merchants, or anything that isn't directly to do with your store. We are deliberately setting these pages up in a format that will be very close to eliminating leaking the visitors to any other page.
If you decide what we are offering is a good fit for you, you can sign up and have your page immediately by going here. Again, please remember this page is completely free. If at any time, for any reason, you no longer want it to be an officially claimed page, you can deactivate it and all of features I have listed above will be instantly removed.
We will make absolutely zero commission from these pages, so bearing that in mind and the fact our site still needs to make at least some money, this is going to be limited to smaller sites only. Please don't try and claim a PC World or a Dell page as it will not be approved
We're happy to listen to feedback and make reasonable changes to how this works. We tested this privately in Beta already, and from feedback there we removed the "recent offers" from claimed pages. We also made the choice of images to make perfectly clear that some sites have no voucher codes, so we are here to listen to what site owners want, and anything within reason will be accommodated. Any questions can either be posted here, pm'd to me, or emailed on lee @ use my domain here .org.
If you already have 1 or more "discount code" pages listed on a voucher website, perhaps you need to look at that page and compare it to what we are offering here, and decide which of them you would rather have your customers on. If pages with all the content deliberately removed or pages pretending to be your mailing list are harming your online marketing efforts, we can help. We already rank top 10 for more than 900 different "BrandName discount codes" so if you want us to help stem the damage from other people ranking for your brand with fake offers (or blank pages), you can go here and claim your page.
Again, if you have any questions, feedback or improvements I would love to hear from you, either here or privately.
Thanks
