Does Google Really Hate Affiliate Sites?

In January 2005 Google changed its Adwords policy to say, "We'll only display one ad for affiliates and parent companies sharing the same Display URL per search query." Consequently, affiliate arbitrageurs who used pay-per-click advertising to send traffic directly to their merchants' sites saw their ads disappear overnight unless they had set them up correctly. Those who hadn't broadened their income streams by building their own affiliate sites or subscriber lists suffered serious hardship when their affiliate commission checks also disappeared.

The additional result was more favorable for the end user of the Web. Intelligent shoppers who make use of Google's Sponsored Listings could run a search for "computer" and choose from a variety of merchants ads. This was a huge improvement over seeing hundreds of identical advertisements. An additional benefit went to affiliates with content sites. As the arbitragers ads went by the roadside, content affiliates listings rose in the ranks and their advertising costs decreased.

Despite the benefits to users and content affiliates, "Google hates all affiliate sites" became a popular chorus on forums throughout the affiliate community, as affiliates who were struggling to meet the new policy and voiced their outrage. A good deal discussion revolved around ways to exploit loopholes in the policy. For instance, some smart affiliate noticed that the algorithm seemed to be case-sensitive, and had failed to remove duplicate ads that shared the same display URL but were capitalized differently. Affiliates frantically revised their Adwords campaigns, but the tactic lasted only a short time before they were sent back to the drafting board to figure out new loopholes.

Around the same time, affiliate sites were dropping like flies from the Google index. An explanation came out in June, when Henk van Ess, a Dutch journalist, reported that a Google employee who had broken a nondisclosure agreement with Google confirmed that Google employed human raters to ferret Out low-quality sites. The report also stated that raters worked according to specifications laid out in Google's "Spam Recognition Guide for Raters." Based on the raters' findings and recommendations, Google was continually tweaking its algorithms to expedite removal of "flimsy affiliate" sites from its index.

Here is a snip from the Google guide: "Thin affiliate doorways are sites that usher people to a number of Affiliate programs, earning a commission for doing so, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user we're attempting to identify sites that do nothing but act as a commission earning middleman."

Affiliates response to the news that Google employed humans to assess affiliate site quality was unbelievable, with related forum threads spanning dozens of pages. A few suggested that affiliates should work in accordance with Google's editorial guidelines to improve their sites. Providing reviews and evaluations of the product you are promoting is a most effective way to stay in the good graces of Google and win the affiliate game. You will find that Google does not hate affiliates but wants something other than billboard in the search results page.