There’s been a lot of buzz about Google recently disclosing who’s next on their hit list of ‘evil doers’ (in their minds anyway) that are going to get slapped out of existence with future and frequent (read daily) Google slaps.
If you haven’t heard about it yet, my friend Geordie Carswell sums it up well on his blog.
Now I can understand Google targeting arbitrage/MFA and malware sites, but comparison shopping sites, travel sites, and ‘get rick quick’ info product sites?!?
WTF?
You know it’s amazing, the pinhead PhDs at Google, all knowing & all wise, are kind enough to tell us pion affiliates what constitutes a legitimate business model and how our business should be run, even though they’ve never started an internet business or done affiliate marketing.
They never spend months struggling, losing money, working hard to get their affiliate offers profitable.
They were never force to work with super thin margins that affiliates do to squeeze out a profit from their efforts.
They never bought one of those so called ‘get rich quick’ ebooks, applied the info in them, make enough money to quit their jobs and change their lives. (Thanks to those scummy ‘get rick quick’ ebooks I’m financially free today!)
Really!
Who’s making these decisions at Google as to what a legitimate business model or method of promotion is? Is Google on a quest to protect their benighted visitors from internet marketing sharks (i.e. affiliate marketers and info marketers)??
Who are they kidding?
Perhaps Google should stop cooperating with the Chinese government to crack down on human rights protesters before they start making judgments what we do and promote.
Google, don’t be evil!
Am I ranting?
Nevertheless it’s sad that ill informed people, who don’t understand affiliate marketing, are making decision that are going to put a lot of affiliates, who’ve been busting their butts for years, out of business overnight.
Yes there are plenty of bad ebooks, and comparison and travel sites that don’t add much value. However, there are also plenty of really great ebook out there, I’ve read my share that’s for sure.
Were it not for these info products a lot of us super affiliates would not be where we are today, and may never have even discovered the business.
There’s also lots of great comparison shopping affilaite sites (ever heard of pricegrabbers.com, fatwallet.com) and affiliate niche travel sites as well.
Is Google going to slap all of these sites as well??
Anyhow, this is all the more reason that affiliates really need to whatever they can to follow (however ridiculous) Google landing page quality and site quality guidelines.
Here’s what that means:
- Only promote stuff (on Google) that Google considers legit. In other words stay away from comparison shopping (does this include all datafeeds?), info products, MFA sites, incentivised offers, zip submits, etc, etc. Sorry! Their rules not mine.
- Follow my suggestions for making your affiliate site Google friendly.
- Consider focusing more-much more-attention on Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN Adcenter. That is if you’re not already doing so. BTW, Yahoo’s new interface ROCKS!
For those of you who have given up trying to fight Google landing page quality smack downs, have heart, my sites have been completed unaffected by all the Google slaps this year.
In fact after one of the slaps my min bids actually went down! 
It’s not hard creating a Google happy site, just follow these suggestions.
comparison shopping sites google adwords google landing page quality google slaps info product
Well said Amit… I agree it is getting a bit ridiculous.. whats next? Or should I say, what’s left?
Peter
Amen Amit! You’d think they would be bending over backwards to help the people that put the money in their bank accounts every month. Hell, they didn’t even invent PPC! They stole the idea from Bill Gross who invented the original Overture system which was sold to Yahoo. If people are buying the products that affiliates are promoting, then why should Google have a problem with it? The fact that people are buying means that the affiliate has filled a need. Google is a great search engine, but they weren’t the first and I don’t imagine they’ll be the last. That’s one of the great things about technology. Today’s winner may be tomorrow’s loser. Until then, I guess we have to suck it up or go elsewhere.
What I want to know is what defines a “get rich quick scheme”? Sounds way to vague to enforce but we’ll see I guess. Also, what it the world is wrong with comparison shopping sites? Isn’t that what froogle.com is?
Ive yet to create a profitable campaign,im in month one of learning, so its going to take time for me to “get” it. That said, ive decided to follow Amit’s lead and create a content rich site on one subject and use that as my ppc site. I dont like what Google seems to be doing, but im not discouraged, my desire for freedom is greater than the obstacles se’s put in my way. Because of my limited knowledge, i wont move to another se until i learn the fundamentals of adwords, but i know that i will eventually get over to them. Another thing, Google wont be the biggest forever, there will come another that will provide greater incentives and those affiliate dollars will move over there.
Amit, thank you for the time it took you to write this article, with warm regards,
The true king carlos
believe it or not i agree with google.
a lot of the single page websites out there kill the user experience.
as for comparison sites, have u seen the SERPs and PPC results populated by “pseudo” review sites?
They scrape product specs and redirect to a bizrate or shopping.com site.
who the heck needs that?
when i google for sony hard disk camcorder (model number), i want to find a review like they have at cnet.com. where they actually tell you what’s good, and what’s not about the product, not the generic junk i can already get from sony.com.
i agree with what they say, and smart marketers will know how to get around these roadblocks which will hit the low hanging value-destroying marketers…
I find it laughable Google will start penalizing price comparison sites, when they are running FROOGLE (a price comparison site with VERY little unique content). It becomes a case of “do as we say, not as we do.”
What a bunch of self-righteous, communist bastards!
I think I’ll fly to China and try typing in the search term “religious rights” in the Google search box and see how long it takes Google to report me to the Chinese government for human rights violations.
Much like Microsoft, Google has become the next big ‘necessary evil’. At least we can hold out hope that someday Yahoo and MSN will catch up a bit.
Gary
Amit,
Overreacting, perhaps? You’ve always been the “bring on the next 100 slaps” guy.
You know what Google wants, and they haven’t changed their minds about any of that. I still see PPC sites that have nothing but ads on the landing page, and this type of junk cheapens the experience for everyone. They will continue to refine the algorithms so they can better detect these and similarly abusive sites without impacting legitimate sites.
As for “get rich quick” business models and e-books there is the strata of web society out there that tries to “game” the system without returning anything of value. Project Black Mask: link-spam your site to get a high ranking, skim a few thousand dollars of sales until Google catches on and shuts your domain down, then walk away from the domain name and repeat elsewhere. There are automatic website generators, that create complete sites by copying content from other places on the web.
You know what Google *wants to* slap, and seems to me your methods of creating a Google friendly site are sound. There will always be shades of gray and things that will get caught in the net that we feel shouldn’t have been caught, that’s just life. But PPC marketing is an exercise in multivariate optimization, and keeping Google’s little algorithms happy is just another variable to optimize for.
Hi Walter & Andrew,
You’ve made some great points. There are lot of “get rick quick” ebooks, and comparison sites that add little to no value.
However, it apparently seems that Google may be lumping all “get rich quick” ebooks, comparison sites, and travel sites into one. Whether they add value or not. And based on the deficiently of Google’s algorithm, EXPECT that to be the case.
This type of ‘heavy handed regulation’ is going to screw a lot of honest affiliates, while the black hatter will just find a workaround, or some other way to game the system.
I’m with Andrew. There’s no way G is going to start screwing affiliates who have quality sites with quality content (i.e., a pages and pages of informative content), no matter what the niche is. Now it may get a bit tricker for “get rich quick” affiliates to figure out how to presell on their sites, but if they have quality content there, they’ll be fine.
- D