Interesting heads up via Perry Marshall overnight:
“ A new “Google Slap” for Product Review Sites is targeting Affiliates.
This in from Glenn Livingston (www.LivingstonPPC.com) - I’ve posted his
email on my blog:
http://www.perrymarshall.com/product-review-google-slap/ ”
This makes sense from Google’s point of view, as more people implement skinny “conduit” sites, attempting to shoehorn themselves into existing revenue flows. The fact that “fat” affiliate sites with original content and low bounce rates have also been targetted is more of a worry, and has the potential to change the face of ecommerce considerably.
This rather depends how Google deal with affiliate sites that target long-tail keyphrases for organic traffic (bear in mind Quality Score for Adwords has been gently converging with the organic algorithm for a while now) - will they prefer to provide relevant results to searchers even where this is a site containing affiliate links or will they, over time, pull the traffic-flow from such sites? If so, what results will they show instead? For many long-tail searches, the only available results are affiliate sites. I’m particularly thinking about brand searches here where one inevitably ends up at a price comparison site which adds absolutely no value. There are dozens of them and, as a consumer, they wind me up something chronic!
Be that as it may, where there are no non-commercial reviews available, (which is the case for many many brand terms away from the gadget markets, to be honest,) would Google honestly prefer to show less relevant but non-commercial results? This will certainly make interesting watching!
If affiliates are no longer able to direct traffic to merchants from their web page (and make no mistake: all the old link-cloaking games are out - if your browser can follow a link, so can Google; though there is probably mileage in riding the wave to the bitter end with obfuscated javascript links using an external .js file, flash redirects etc) then how, instead, can someone without their own product tap into online revenue streams?
Actually sites like the E30 zone in the UK have been doing it for years - build a community (or “list”) around a specific topic first and foremost, and extract value from (”monetize”) that community second. I can’t see Google ever slapping such a genuinely useful resource, and I’m sure they do OK from “club discounts” and the like (and most sites in this vein could be far better monetised too.)
Personally I just hope Google slaps the infuriating publicly-quoted price comparison sites as hard (if not harder) that the “mom and pop” affiliate template sites!
Should be interesting to watch this one play out.
Tags: adwords · google · list building · listbuilding · perry marshall · seo2 Comments
It’s fairly simple to write a squidoo page, drive ppc traffic there and expect to make a quick buck our of clickbank.
But when you create a website that you naturally add content geared towards a specific market that you can monetize with affiliate products, you assume the position of a real ecommerce marketer. And all you have to do is make sure visitors take an initial step before landing on the page with an afiiliate link.
I pay a lot of attention to helping people generate cheap ppc traffic at my site (http://www.yourincomepotential.com). I’ll post what I think is the best strategy to get over the slap soon.
Leo
I’ve been affected by the recent Google affiliate slap and am interested to see how this plays out. One of my product review sites has all unique content, is not a thin affiliate site, and has still been hard hit.
One of the corrections I’ve made is to add nofollow links to add outgoing affiliate links. However, it might even be safer to use a re-direct as it seems that Google is discounting pages that have outgoing affiliate links.