Can you detect if someone is using Google Toolbar when they visit your site?
If so then promote an alternative, if there is a program for it, or is there a site where your can get your own developed & offer that as an alternative to replace the Google Toolbar.
If promoting an alternative toolbar (not your own) which you get paid for say msn or yahoo offer a pay per lead, this may only prolong the inevitable if they too go down this same path as Google.
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What we should remember is that there are thousands of affiliates & one Google, if & I only say "if" Google & Yahoo are slowly but surely squeezing out affiliates, whether this be from organic searches and / or even ppc (more likely on both fronts). It illustrates how dependent both networks & affiliates are, thus networks should get involved too. But we have suggested this for maybe a couple of years, with the need to think outside the box & plan medium term now.
It won't be long until Google says, no direct linking to merchant on Google (you already can't on Overture or Miva). Then slowly & surely more affiliate sites will get squeezed out entirely or demoted from / in organic search.
Personally I don't advocate to the idea at all that good quality or sites with good content will survive in organic search. What may be deemed as good content to one, may not be to another & is down to personal conjecture. The policy we are considering adopting is don't get emotionally attached to any site, create many & stack them high (you can still create reasonably good quality sites from doing this)
Then what do you do? simply get together as a collective.... however this rarely materialises & perhaps will not work as there is possibly not enough selflessness out there to make it work, with a majority probably waiting for someone else to do it & the likes of Google & Yahoo know this. But just imagine the hype affiliates as a collective could actually make on anything with just a little application & pulling in the same direction. Not suggesting for a moment we should want to get rid of the likes of G&Y not at all, but we should stand our ground with our own offerings & say "no more".
Short term gain is all to easy .... indeed "milk the cow whilst it is fat" (as another affiliate once said) by all means but it isn't necessarily the only way.
One partial solution would be for networks & the massive number of publishers / affiliates to have or create a hybrid search engine / product search with toolbar for affiliates promoted by affiliates. There must surely be a small search engine that is in fact very good & not had the hype associated with it or a R&D (research & development) department in some university needing a bit of financial backing (in return for a stake) that can be promoted instead.
Like Tyson suggested in another thread, most affiliates need or are going to use Google for their means, whether it be
SEO, PPC or Adsense no matter what... What you simply do is use them like they use you. (Guessing that 13 to 20% of their adwords spend is derived from affiliates, plus a large proportion from adsense). They will use affiliates until they have no further need for us & simply discard us like some turkey giblet, which won't be that long away, so reciprocate. Earn as much revenue legitimately from them as possible to earn your living but splitting your time, money & resources accordingly to counter with a self insurance measure.
At the end of the day none of us have any divine right to be listed organically in a search engine.
