I saw a thread in the Adwords section of this forum regarding this subject. It obviously caught my attention because I am promoting Clickbank products using PPC and review websites. After looking around a bit, I found a couple of blog/forum posts regarding the subject. Just curious what you all thought. http://www.johncow.com/google-adwords-slap-on-review-sites/ http://www.perrymarshall.com (His latest post)
I find it hard to believe that affiliate links are being slapped and cloaked ones left alone. Basically that would punish a minority of beginners and ignore the pros. Mind you the Perry post does say it might be soon. Doesn't make sense to me. Of course, this is just a small part of the slap. I find it hypocritical of Google considering they make money out of Adsense which is paid links. Cheeky bastards.
I don't find this news surprising at all. This is probably more in relation to those scammy fake review "blogs" that aren't blogs at all, they're just straight up landing page scams. They tend to trick users into recurring billing products that are sold as "free trials". All of that is incredibly misleading and now that the government is stepping in to go after those scam artists, Google is cleaning up their own mess before this gets even more out of hand. In grand Google fashion, they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but that's probably a proactive kind of thing. They could have just gone with the make money online "google cash" type offers and the acai/resveratol pills, but the marketers would move on to a different thing. By hitting everyone it sends a clear signal. In the long run this is not an issue of "cloaking" affiliate links as being a way around the new policies. It is simply an issue of Google wanting to squeeze out affiliates so that companies go directly to Google for their CPA affiliate relationships while at the same time looking like a white knight when the government comes in to clean out the riff-raff. Hitting affiliates who do review sites now works great for Google because it will push more companies into the Google affiliate program and it will clean up some of the scams on their ad network, so it's a double win for them. For affiliates, well you can't look at PPC as a long term business model anyway. Offers die and bans happen all the time. You're acting as a middle man and Google hates when someone else gets to play middle man. If someone is going to get paid for sitting in the middle, it's Google.
Yes, Google is Slapping affiliate hard This is not the first time Google has slapped Affiliates, Remember when they introduced the "double serving rule" Keep in mind that Google is all about a "Good User experience" and these damn affiliate review sites are mostly all bullsh*t and make for a "poor user experience" I have been reading more and more posts on various forums about landing pages ( that used to have a great quality score) getting slapped with a poor quality score and a cost per click of $10.00
I know a couple of people who Google banned and they all promoted the Google Cash offer. Is that why they got banned? I believe so as none of them where doing much of anything else but that.