Another Google Slap Penalizes Affiliate Marketers Using PPC
I got an email from Perry Marshal entitled Urgent: Google Drops the Hammer on Affiliates – Again on Tues but didn’t have a chance to read his article on the subject until today…
It seems that Google is slapping affiliate review sites this time. This is especially true of those landing pages that contain raw affiliate links in them. Quality scores with these have been seen to slip from a score of 10 to only 1. I guess that Google sees them as being thin affiliate sites. I’ve talked to a number of affiliate marketers today and found that the ones using cloaked or PHP redirected links didn’t get the slap (unless they were thin sites).
So, I revved up my Google Adwords Editor and checked my PPC campaigns. The slap only affected one of my campaigns, and not all the keywords in it. I did get a couple of my keyword themes showing up with a quality score of 1. But these were themes that I have had trouble with in the past for some unknown reasons and have had to tweak the landing pages before, so it was no real surprise. I’ve paused them and will make a whole new landing page for those keyword themes.
I do a lot of PPC affiliate marketing with review pages and sites so I guess that I was lucky that only one campaign suffered. The fact is that Google want to send visitors to relevant, high quality landing pages that add value to the internet and the user experience.
Google has told us in the past that they don’t like thin affiliate sites, get rich quick pages, comparison shopping sites that don’t add value, and travel aggregators. It should be no surprise that they are now looking down on review sites that don’t add valuable content to the internet and are nothing but thinly disguised affiliate links.
You might want to check your own Adwords campaigns if any contain reviews and see if you were one of the lucky ones to get the slap.
Tags: Adwords, affiliate marketing, Google slap, quality score, review sites, thin affiliate
Related Posts on Ristvin Marketing Blog
Posted: July 23rd, 2009 under affiliate marketing.
Comments: none
Write a comment