Has Google Declared War on Affiliates

**aldo** · 04-03-05

Hi All,
I have always thought that those boffins that control the Google algorithm do not like affiliate sites, thinking that a merchants site will always be more relevent to the searcher.

Now I am getting the feeling that they have declared war on us.

First there was the whole PPC thing, and now it seems that they may have tweaked the algo in such a way that it discriminates against affiliates sites,

As an affiliate manager I get to see a lot of statistics and speak with a hell of a lot of affiliates and I am getting this feeling due to the following.

A large number of affiliates have told me that they lost positions in the SERPs since last Months Google dance.

The Affiliate sales in some of my campaigns have dropped a little in February but the conversions have remained strong.

One of the merchant sites that I do the SEO for has not been negitively effected by the February dance.

As you can see the above is still only a small snap shot of the market it may just be that I am getting paranoid. I would appreciate it if everyone could add their experiences to this post in order for us all to see the bigger picture.

You can also find a similar post on this subject in the AW section of this forum by Goaty called "Downturn in business"

Heres hoping that I am just a paranoid guy,

Al

**Mogga** · 04-03-05

Luckily there are other search engines out there.

I'm sure as affiliates we have a lot of audience still and could use our combined force to promote other search engines.
Of course if all webmasters blocked the google bot that would be the end of google.

**aldo** · 04-03-05

Mogga,
Do you think this could be a tactic by Google to force us to spend more on paid advertising like Adsense or Adwords?

Think about it, if you can't get to the top of the SERPs you will probably fill the holes with PPC and now on Google if you want the site URL you have to pay through the nose for the top spot.

**tomj** · 04-03-05

I think affiliates declared war on google a long time ago! As mogga said thank god there are other search engines out there.

However what we are seeing now is Google counter attacking & attempting to reclaim their turf.....good luck

**smn2** · 04-03-05

Hi,

I think if affiliates deliver a half-way decent, and in some way
unique, website (and not some Espotting clone, etc.) then
Google will still deliver free traffic to a site.

(A lot of my sites have been annihilated by Google in terms
of search engine ranking, have been for years now, but these
very same sites rank well on MSN, BUT... one of my sites gets
more and more free traffic from Google)

Or... am I just being naive?

Most sites are affiliate sites these days. Kelkoo,
MSN, even Amazon are affiliated with Figleaves
and that travel site.

Maybe Google just doesn't like small-fry!

**aldo** · 04-03-05

That just goes to prove that Google still loves her links,

"Results 1 - 100 of about 492,000 linking to www.Amazon.com. (0.59 seconds"

"Results 1 - 100 of about 2,290 linking to www.Kelkoo.com. (0.70 seconds)"

Al

**Rich** · 04-03-05

I think there are a lot of affiliate generated pages that Google is realising arn't of much value and is ranking them lower. And it is possibly being a bit heavy handed with that and so failing to show some good affiliate sites.

As for the PPC changes, though they mentioned affiliates in the announcement, I don't think it was designed to make life harder for us. As it was the first 3 ads could all point to the same page, so the user would click the first one, not like the page so go back and click on the second one, get to the same page so go back and click on the third one, get the same page again and decide to never click on Google ads again. The new rules try to make the results a bit better for the users. I don't do much PPC so I don't know how the changes have affected bid prices.

**goforbroke** · 04-03-05

Originally posted by smnash
I think if affiliates deliver a half-way decent, and in some way
unique, website (and not some Espotting clone, etc.) then
Google will still deliver free traffic to a site.

Running a number of sites, some heavily loaded with affiliate ads and others not so, I have to agree with the above. The more unique of my sites certainly rank a lot higher than my others.

**bapages** · 05-03-05

Talking of Google, it was interesting to read that they now have a license to sell domain names.

**Mc661** · 05-03-05

Originally posted by bapages
Talking of Google, it was interesting to read that they now have a license to sell domain names.

so does the BBC funnily enough! But you dont see the BBC openly selling them.
Just wondering when, not if, google will start selling domains to the public for cheep.

**getvisible** · 05-03-05

Talking of Google, it was interesting to read that they now have a license to sell domain names.

think outside the box ... think what data they can get ...

**Bod** · 05-03-05

Have a village website with ads, suddenly dropped to 6th page listing with ads, took as off to redo pages and havent got round to finishing them yet, now we are top of the list again. makes you wonder

**smn2** · 05-03-05

What sort of ads, Bod?

**Bod** · 05-03-05

TD and CJ ones

From the feb update I was top then dropped to page 6, havent done any changes apart from drop the ads from TD and CJ have now rised back top