So here I am doing a keyword research yesterday, all of a sudden I realize something very important, Google doesn't care anymore. Think of this as you are Google itself, and you need to supply the best possible results for people that search it, what do you do? how do you fight and block all of the affiliate trashy sites out of your results? these are really a problem for Google because the core foundation of Google is to offer valuable information and businesses for users that search it, Currently there is information overflow for every term, so this is not a problem for Google to have good results to show because there are too many of them. Remember that for Google it only matters what top 10 results get and the rest is just archive results. Google doesn't need affiliate sites showing in their first 10 SERP, some affiliate sites are good, others are bad, if I am Google what do I do ? I would ban them all, remember that there are just too many results and SERP competition these days. Just as Google bans direct or irrelevant affiliates from adwords, they do it in their organic as well. Now go to Google, search for non-competetive term, i.e "defrag computer" what do you see? it's only 34k competition in SERP, that's right, you see first 10 results are all popular authority sites, alexa lower than 4k probably, they have huge number of backlinks to their main home page, that could have it by natural ways! affiliate sites probably wont be able to get that many BL. So, where I'm going with all these? I think google doesn't really care about your site, because there are too many of them, and it gives extra credit to internal pages that come from within Authority sites. Now there's one problem here, and that's relevancy, if in 2013 I need to search relevant results to 2013, I may get information that was written in 2012 so that wont be relevant to me, so what google does? it updates internal pages from within the same authority sites to show in SERP, and I have seen it dozen of times from many sites such as about.com, themeforest.net, etc, etc, etc.. if these have newer content to show, that content is shown instead of the old one, and in the worse case scenario it will switch to another authority site that can be located in 10-40 results. Google keeps PR because it just wants to punish the affiliates and the internet spam they are creating when in reality ranking isn't based just on links, but links within authority sites get extra ranking credit and that credit isn't calculated within the PR because each search phrase is different and the calculation is done differently and the credit changes. So in 10 years from now when all the internet will have many authority sites that can provide content, Google will sit with them on top of the mountain, the big fishes and the rest will try to climb it but will always fail. Google also does it with their natural SERPS that they show such as flights, etc. that what they care and its the satisfaction of the customer.
Well, if i assume your theory is right then here is your solution. Put all your effort in making your site a authority site... that way all your internal pages will rank higher then affiliate pages. i see where your going with this theory but i dont agree.
the only way to create authority site is naturally, i.e developing a product and it will spread itself because its good, there are other ways, I already own a PR7 website with many bls so I know it works only naturally usually. on long tail keywords sure you can probably rank high but these have low search volume and google cares about the 90% and not their 10% search volume. it can be true or not, personally i'm going both ways, i have authority site i will rank for internal pages but also affiliate and supportive small sites in grey area that im trying to rank as well. even for terms as low as 3k phrase searches a month its happening, search for "white teeth in photoshop" and you'll see it has some exceptions but really it has only 100 searches a month.
A nice post!I didn't really look that way on what Google is doing but you seem pretty versed in those things!