Google Hates Affiliates?

So I’ve been catching up on some of the latest news and I see a whole bunch of people have received an adwords slap on their review sites and suffered from falling quality scores which begs the question does Google hate affiliates?

There have been many responses and more than a few people have pointed out that Google has it’s own affiliate network so it shouldn’t be looking to make affiliates suffer unnecessarily.  What are your thoughts on this?

For my part I don’t really get it.  If someone puts up a review site and then wants to drive traffic to it via PPC for which Google gets paid is there really a need to penalize?  If the site is crap it won’t make any money and the cpc and lack of conversion will ensure it soon disappears.  If the product is crap then you can almost always get a refund.  So what is Google up to (if anything)?

I am inclined to think that the majority of sites that have been slapped are not adhering to Googles Webmaster Guidelines.  No one ever seems to admit that their sites breach these guidelines but my own experience shows that they are enforced quite rigorously and the usual reason for receiving a slap or worse the death sentence of deindexation.

Many will have seen that Webmaster Tools was updated not too long back and quality score became a touch more transparent.  Many of my remaining BANS stores were deindexed following that update as were some of my phpBay stores.  The reason?  Well, you can never be 100% certain but almost certainly for using the 3 Way Linking System devised by Jonathan Leger.

3 Way Links was a lifesaver for me  when I first got started with BANS helping my stores into profit through improved rankings at a time when I simply couldn’t afford to undertake manual link building.   However, within webmaster guidelines it falls under paid links so I can have no complaints about my treatment from Google.  I have promoted the 3 way linking system and I will continue to do so because traffic from Yahoo and more recently Bing (since Mircosoft updated the lousy MSN search engine) still generate a tidy profit .  So maybe paid links still have their place but with Google you’re walking a tightrope.

It is a fact that we all need Google whilst they are the search engine of choice for 85% of the worlds population.  I hope the monopoly is broken soon but it doesn’t look likely.  In the meantime if you want to play in Googles yard then we need to follow the webmaster rules.  And boy it is worth it.  One of the few sites I had with a top 10 Google ranking for it’s chosen keywords has subsequently suffered an 80% drop in earnings over the last 6 weeks and that’s a bitter pill to swallow.

Tagged with: deindexed • google slap • webmaster tools

Filed under: Obeservations

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