Affiliate Money Maker

Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land has posted about the updated Google Quality Guidelines for webmasters:

* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
* Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
* Don’t send automated queries to Google.
* Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
* Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
* Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.
* Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.
* If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Clearly, as affiliates, our attention should be drawn to the last two sentences. Search Engine Roundtable sums up the overall opinion of the forum mebers discussing this change that “the new guidelines are much more explicit and clear” - which cannot be bad as now we know what it is exactly that Google doesn’t like about affiliate sites.

So, what should I make out of this all? First of all, here’s more proof that I am on the right track building review sites or comparison sites for products instead of just redirecting the visitors straight to the affiliate site. Second, all these increasing limitations will surely have even more impact on affiliate sites using PPC - which makes me kinda happy I rely on organic SERPs mostly so far. At some point, I guess I will be tempted to try the paid advertising model for my sites just to get the feel of it - but it should be approached correctly.