'Thin Affiliates' - avoiding being penalised by Google

[sneakysausage]

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Hi everyone,

Apologies if this question has been asked before, this is my first post on the forum.

I am part way through developing an affiliate site using automated feeds from the BuyAT network.

Yesterday i discovered the 'affiliate' page on wikipedia that mentioned how google penalise sites that they label as "thin affiliates" by either removing from the index, or taking from the first 2 pages of the results and moved deeper within the index.

It states that to avoid being categorised as a thin affiliate, you must provide 'real value' in your site

This came as a bit of a shock as my site will basically be displaying product details which when clicked redirect the browser to the external merchants site. Product are found by doing a keyword search or navigating the category hierarchy

Before i bother to develop my site further, i need to understand the easiest ways to avoid an affiliate site being penalised as a 'thin affiliate' by google.

Developing this site is a side line, so any work undertaken will be done by myself.

At the momment i am receiving the full list of feeds. I have considered creating a shopping guide for each category like on kelkoo, but there are far too many (250 ish)

Another option is possibly to restrict my site to a certain area, but having NO clue about what is easiest to sell, i dont know where to start - maybe this is a seperate thread anyway.

Here is the list of BuyAT categories:

Baby, Books, Computers, Electronics, DVDs, Food & Drink, Gifts, Fashion, Health & Beauty, Home & Garden, Household Appliances, Money & Bills, Motoring, Music, Office, Phone Internet & TV, Sports Equipment, Special Offers, Toys, Travel & Holidays

Any thoughts/advice would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks
Chris

[eskimo]

Hi Chris

Welcome to the forum. The notion of 'thin affiliates' being targetted by Google is relativeley new and no-one knows for sure whether this is being done.

The general antidote to this threat seems to be to create original content and play down or disguise the affiliate links and 'spam' content in your site.

Plenty of feed based sites do well, and there is plenty of traffic to go around. Though many new entrants are advised to focus on niche areas, as you pointed out.

Good luck and I look foward to eeing you around the boards.

[markschok]

sneakysausage, as far as I remember the Thin Affiliate thing came out of a supposedly leaked google document showing guidelines for their human editors. I don't think google actually every verified this was true. They always maintain their results are automated with very little human intervertion. How much no one knows. That said of course they are always trying to improve their index and so naturally, poor sites will sink down the SERPs. I'd suggest you go with a broad range of feeds as you have and then find which areas work best for you. Then concentrate on those areas.
good luck

[giveasyouget]

There was a posting a while back of some 'spam control' documents published by google for their internal search quality evaluation team - i think on www.searchbistro.com

in it it stated whilst affiliate sites are not bad in themselves they must offer some kind of added value, specifically mentioning price comparison, reviews and one or two other things which i forget.
price comparison - mm well i think its still very easy to hit an automatic filter if your site is pure price comparison. reviews are good but having had the option of writing reviews for your users doesn't always mean they'll do it so you better get onto it yourself.
Writing your own descriptions for products - something i know many people on here do - should help you avoid duplicate content penalties
buyers guides is a very good idea - and theres no reason you need to write all 250 at once, you can make it an ongoing process.

i think this discussion is something we could all benefit from, anybody else got any cunning plans?

[haggul]

I truly believe that this sort of stuff does happen - either by human intervention or not. How do you reckon you can get out of that once you are in it - would working on and improving the site automatically get you out once it recognises some extra value or do you think it's a one way ticket to SERP obscurity??

[saysomestuff]

So what value is your site to the internet then? If you can't answer that, you won't rank naturally on Google

[KieronD]

Well I've been going to the gym a bit lately but still wouldn't call myself "thin".

Sorry, taxi!

[haggul]

Fair point - was just asking the question because as with most people a site won't have all the features, content etc fully sorted from the word go - so just wondering out loud if Google would recognise improvements?? I'm sure there are many other factors at play that Google would never admit to, but at the end of the day they don't like giving traffic away do they??

[drivetowin]

Take a step back and think "what does my site offer my visitors which no other site does (or very few other sites do (and by very few I mean less than half a dozen)) ?"

If the honest answer is nothing, then rip up the sheet of paper and start again.

If the honest answer is a).... b).... c)..... then Google will be a trusty companion but like any relationship you need to keep constantly working at it.

Sorry but that is the harsh reality, if you want to suceed in natural search you need to offer something different - to me you know you've made it when you find people searching in google not for a search term, but for the name of your site - because that means people are telling other people, and people only do that if they have found something really useful (or I guess something they really despise but I don't want to follow that thought too long.....)

Another good clue is to check your server logs to see how many of your visitors are adding you to their favourites - some of my sites have >80% repeat visitors - so I guess I'm doing something right...

[moredial]

A lot of search engines are penalising affiliate links - in fact any site that has too many links containing a "?" are at risk of being penalised.

One way around this is by using javascript links rather than html links.

How true is the threat of being 'banned'? The truth is that people are fed up with using google only to have all the top results just being another 'directory' site that is spamming on keywords to make money on the click throughs. A few months back google asked for sites that were showing google ads and spamming in this way to be reported - if google has the evidence they can update their algorithms to knock such sites down in future updates.

The problem is that these algo changes also catch the innocent sites.

You can avoid being 'caught' by not having too many links to a page. Keep your links within the main body text and have the pages you are linking to relevant to your page topic.

At the end of the day, what you need is relevant content on your page so that other sites will link to you - that is the only way to keep your rankings in google.

[giveasyouget]

A lot of search engines are penalising affiliate links - in fact any site that has too many links containing a "?" are at risk of being penalised.

I'm sorry, that's rubbish. Millions of sites from technical support to newspapers to government informaiton sites use ?'s, as it is the standard for dynamically driven sites. It would be insanity to use that as a filter.

It was the case that sites based on query strings like these would find it much harder to get indexed, especially if there was many queries, but it seems that up to a point search engines are now pretty happy to index them too.

[moredial]

It was the case that sites based on query strings like these would find it much harder to get indexed, especially if there was many queries, but it seems that up to a point search engines are now pretty happy to index them too.

Search engines do find it hard to index them. Some sites with only a few hundred pages are shown as having thousands of pages because the search engines have ended up going around in circles with all the dynamic urls.

This is why google has asked dynamic sites to create the google site map on their servers...

[sneakysausage]

Thanks for all the replies, its been very useful. I should have come here 3 months ago when i started developing the site !

Looking at kelkoo again, surprisingly they only have about 30 shoppping guides, covering mainly electronics categories (ie scanners). They do however also have options to compare prices between merchants and compare features between similar products, both of which must add value.

In addition i notice that they have no product landing pages. They show product listings, but the landing page is on the merchant site.

images supplied by BuyAT are fullsize, so i was planning to show the image on the product landing page with links to 'similar products' to improve SEO.

on reflection, this is probably not the best approach as people want to see the thumbnail in a product listing, which means to need to change to a affiliate network that supplies thumbnails instead.

This is probably off topic, but can anyone recommend a more suitable affiliate network for me ?

Many Thanks
Chris

[Sammy aff]

I'ts very unlikely a thin affiliate will figure on organic results (at least mid to long term)
However google loves 'thin affiliates' who use adwords, especially in lucrative markets, ie estate agent, lawyers, travel. --adsense scrapers

Google does make me sick with their contridictive terms depending if you pay

[moredial]

I'ts very unlikely a thin affiliate will figure on organic results (at least mid to long term)
However google loves 'thin affiliates' who use adwords, especially in lucrative markets, ie estate agent, lawyers, travel. --adsense scrapers

The is no reason at all for any affiliate not to be there in the organic results. I have never used anything else for web promotion and I have been on the first page for my search terms since my sites were written. They have slipped a little with Yahoo redoing its database, but without making any changes over the last year, they are all now starting to come back again.
I know lots of fellow affiliates who now only rely on the organic results for their promotion. Anything else just costs too much for those who are not in control of the purchase side or access to logs to be able to calculate revenue per visitor.