Can I get some feed back on some info I was sent this morning : Q&A - What's the best way to optimize an affiliate site? I am thinking about creating a site that would make money solely from affiliate programs. I have a good keyword-rich domain name and a decent collection of affiliate programs to promote. I think the concept is sound and it should do well if I can get the site indexed. My question: Are there any special considerations in optimizing sites with a lot of affiliate links? Answer: The era of affiliate marketers putting up a link and simply optimizing the on-page elements of their site to score well for a keyword is drawing to a close. The search engines are weeding out duplicate, near-duplicate, and redundant sites. On the other hand, the engines love what everyone refers to as content sites—especially "great" content sites. One might say the bad news is that affiliates will have to work harder for their affiliate commissions. However, the good news for knowledgeable affiliate marketers is that the competition is likely to decrease significantly. Many of the affiliate-sales entrepreneurs are simply cherry pickers. They put up a quick website and hope for the easy deals. Of course, that's understandable. The problem is that it's starting to not work anymore. These days the successful affiliate-marketers are having to become more imaginative. Those that continue to thrive are the affiliates who know enough to specifically target the products and services that can be profitably sold by way of value-added informational-type sites. By that we mean they must create sites that educate consumers about a specific product as well as offer the product itself. Obviously, not every product lends itself to such an educational opportunity that can be translated into compelling sales copy, but most will. Product reviews are one great way to add value to an affiliate site, both from a user's and a search engine's point of view. Clearly, the more the affiliate knows about overall search engine marketing (SEM), the more they stand to gain from the maturing affiliate marketplace. But, otherwise, we see the shifting sands of search swallowing up the efforts of less-serious affiliate marketers. One of the best pieces of advice we can offer is to read Google's recently released internal document at: http://www.searchbistro.com/spamguide.doc In it, Google spells out the guidelines that its human reviewers use to distinguish quality sites from spam sites. There's a lot of explanation about why Google might tag an affiliate site as spam. There's also this: http://www.searchbistro.com/guide.pdf In short, these two documents tell us that if a site adds value to its links, then they shouldn't be treated as spam even if they could be considered a link farm or affiliate site under normal circumstances. In other words, if you can add elements like brief summaries or reviews of the sites you're linking to, you'll have created a valuable service—and search engines will likely reward you for that. We highly recommend perusing both documents, particularly the first one (spamguide.doc) to give you a good idea of where the guidelines are drawn in the sand for value-added affiliate marketers.
There's some more info here: http://affiliate-blogs.5staraffiliateprograms.com/2005/06/30/thin-affiliate-google-spam/