Hey all, Don't know if you're aware, but lately Google has essentially been kicking affiliates out of Adwords by giving them the lowest Quality Score possible on their accounts. They've now started banning affiliates who submit more than one landing page to adwords. They're doing this because their are too many low quality sites out there all selling the same products and a lot of them are scams. I think this is a prelude to weeding out affiliates form the SERPS too - why do I think this? The same rules of user experience apply to the SERPS and Adwords, it's just that there are less sites to hit on Adwords so they're trying it out there first. There have been quite a few sites hit when they're not affiliates that G are letting back on after being banned - I think they're using this data to refine the process and then - wham - the naturals will be hit next. What do you all think? If I was an affiliate and using the SERPS on g as my primary traffic source i'd start planning my back-up plan just in case
I think that if natural search results are next then as long as you don't have a spam site you will be fine. Lots of sites are build around selling affiliate products. Even good sites.
I am not an adwords user (have seen some of the rants around about G weeding out affiliates) nor a big affiliate marketer. That said, it seems to me that it would be pretty easy to disguise affiliate links so that G's automated systems don't recognize what they're dealing with. Might no pass a hand check, but those are few and far between. Hide the links via JS and/or a noindex/nofollow landing page - blocked in robots.txt - within your own site (i.e. www.example.com/aff0001.htm) that forwards it on. Simple things like this will befuddle most anything G tries. Part of the fallout here will be those business offering affiliate programs that will now lose massive amounts of inbound links. The law of unintended consequences?
yes, affiliate sites are getting hit by adwords and lot of sites are being reviewed manually. however, no such thing is yet happening for serp results. i see plenty of affiliate sites ranking well on search results. even if google decides to penalize affiliate sites on search results, it wil lbe very hard to implement. when it comes to affiliate links, there are so many ways to hide the affiliate links which will make it impossible for googlebot to identify an affiliate site
The big G is practicing its power again... And those Affiliate business companies would get seriously hurt by this maybe like huge fall in the traffic.
The key to keeping your affiliate URLs in the organic SERPs is content. If your site adds nothing additional of value and simply spits out the same sales jargon supplied by the advertiser, then I think they SHOULD remove it from the SERPs. What value does it add to the user making a search? Why should Google keep 10,000 copies of pages in their index that all have the advertiser's canned sales pitch on it just because the advertiser has 10,000 different affiliates and they each have their own landing page? If, however, your site actually adds value to the user by reviewing the product, reviewing similar products, providing articles related to the product, etc. and you are careful about not overlinking to the advertiser to make it look like your site's only purpose in life is to sell that product, then I think you have little to fear. Google has hated affiliate pages showing up in the SERPs for a long time (and rightly so). Their Webmaster Guidelines even warn about "thin affiliate sites". If you have a 1 page site whose only purpose is as an affiliate landing page, and that page shows in the SERPs... the first time a Google Quality Rater stumbles onto it or someone submits a Spam Report about it and a Googler manually reviews it, that page will more than likely disappear immediately from the SERPs never to return. But that's nothing new IMO. It's been that way for years (as it should be IMO)...
Exactly, nowadays to get your site high in Google you need lots of content and regular updates. One page affiliate sites don't have this so don't show up anyway.
I agree with Canonical. "Thin" affiliate sites have been against Google's guidelines for quite some time. But sites with quality content that add value are welcome. From Google Webmaster Guidelines: "There is no problem in being an affiliate as long as you create some added value for your users and produce valuable content that gives a user a reason to visit your site. For example, you could create product reviews, ratings, and product comparisons."
Recent reports suggest that many reivew, rating and comparison sites are being terminated from adwords. Don't know what that means for the future of the organic SERP's...
I've actually seen the opposite - I've created a new Adwords campaign from scratch for one of my eBay affiliate stores. I'm targeting popular long-term keywords. After a few days, I'm hitting positions 1-2 and only bidding .15 cents per keyword, but exhausting my daily budget. Then again, this site has a lot of content on it, and a lot of care put into the site structure & SEO.
What kind of ads & landing pages was that guy running? What was his previous history on Adwords? For all anyone knows, he could have been running a thin affiliate site, or worse...
There are somewhere around 250 posts in that thread, and quite a few people that have been hit by the termination letter. You might want to actually read, since it could effect you as well. Of course, YMMV.