Jun 15, 2011
Utilizing the power of today’s top search engines to increase your site’s rankings and drive more affiliate traffic your way can really help line your pockets if it’s done well — if done fraudulently, however, you can find yourself with a penalized URL at the bottom of Google’s slush pile, with a damaged reputation and little hope of getting to the top again.
Search engines have become more influential than ever before, and some affiliate marketers have evolved from the sending of e-mail spam to proliferating automatically generated web pages containing data feeds from various product merchants. These webpages exist solely to game the ranking value of resources indexed by the search engines. This practice is called spamdexing, and is a black hat technique that should be avoided. For one thing, it doesn’t work anymore — and for another thing, it’s extremely poor practice.
Spam in all its forms constitutes the biggest single threat to organic search engines and their ability to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by web searchers. Google’s algorithm update for page rankings in February 2006 targeted spamdexing with great aplomb. The update assisted Google in the elimination of a large amount of automatically generated duplicate content from its index.
In 2005 Google made some key changes in the way site containing mostly affiliate links are indexed, wherein certain websites were labeled as “thin affiliates”. These websites were either stricken from Google’s index or demoted to lower ranking positions. The only way to avoid this negative ranking placement is to generate original, quality content for the web pages, instead of having Google crawl and finding only affiliate links.
Many commentators in the industry theorized that affiliate links are most effective within the context of the information contained on the website itself. For example, if a website contains information about web site hosting and design, an affiliate link leading to a web hosting company with whom the site owner has an affiliate relationship inside that website’s content would be expected. If a website contains information pertaining to satellite television, an affiliate link to a satellite television provider’s website would work well, included in the context of articles and information about television programming or channels.
The more recent algorithm update from Google (“Panda”/”Farmer”), went a step further in its attempt to eradicate irrelevant content from web sites, and lessen the rankings of sites featuring gibberish and unrelated affiliate links. Now, content really is king, and without the high quality of content that has to do directly with a web site’s subject there is a very real danger of losing rankings and facing penalties.
The caveat to you: write original, high quality content for your websites. If you include affiliate links, make sure they are nestled inside of articles that are about something related to that affiliate’s company in some way. For example, if you advertise how to get Satellite TV be sure to write an article about satellite tv, and NOT rubber ducks. Don’t just populate your articles, high quality or not, with unrelated links. If you are consistently following this advice, you will be able to increase the likelihood of rising in search engine rankings. Thanks to our colleagues at cableinternetbundles.com
