A couple years ago Google seemed to really have it out for affiliate websites. Lately I've been seeing quite a few of them doing well in the Google SERPS. Often times I even see affiliate websites ranking for hard to reach terms with lots of competition. How does your affiliate website do in Google? Do you rank in the top 5 of over 1,000,000 million results for your target keywords? --- -- -
My sites rank fairly well for long tail keywords in my niche. It is starting to show up more and more in the top 10 for keywords that return tens of millions of results.
I've seen a lot of affiliate sites that rank well in google. But I also notice that they really have good contents and a lot of backlinks.
To be honest its always been a worry, Google can change so often, but so far we have tried our best to make the sites compatible. One area that was difficult that we have now fixed is that there was default text area on each side that affiliates are meant to change into their own relevant wording. Many affiliates didn't bother doing this, so we have changed this now so default for wording is loud and clear and says, "Please change this area of text" or words to that effect. Depending on the type of marketing is also important, regardless anyone that is using adwords as a form of marketing, we want allow to use a sub-domian or template and rather give a customised page, just for this reason. Most of the pages are editable, excpet for the "Powered by World Dating partners", which is something we have to do for our Merchant bank. This can be changed also under certain circumstances by offering a seperate merchant ID to the affiliate, this is important as well for companies that want a stonger brand, so their name appear on bank statments. Other than this I would say the majority of affiliates use SEO as their preferred form of marketing and haven't yet been effected.
Just an add on to the last post - the system is built to be customised, adding new pages, feeds or content, some affiliates sadly don't make the best use of this.