Google doesn't hate affiliates

[nichenews]

I've read quite a lot of posts recently around the internet about how Google hates affiliates and if you use Adwords and want to promote affiliate programs you're going to have problems.

This is simply not true.

I started advertising a new website and have a quality score of 10 and my landing page has 16 affiliate links on it (yes 16!).

As long as you're not promoting make money scams, putting up flogs or rebill offers you shouldn't have a problem promoting products as an affiliate using Adwords.

[jitterbug978]

wait a few weeks for a manual review then boom... slapped.

at least cloak your links.

Sure your sneaking by now, but just wait. It'll happen and then you'll realize Google really isnt that fond of affiliate offers.

[zakiprofit]

actually nowadays Adword did not allow people to use affiliate link on the actual targeted url. But it's not a big problems to most of the internet marketeer. you can use sub domain then redict to the affiliate link.
That will solve the problem

[darkblue]

I have affiliate links on my landing page also, and nothing yet. And it's been several weeks now.

We'll see.

What about direct linking? Is that still ok to do?

[Catalyst eMarketing]

While I agree that nichenews could very well get slapped once they get around to a manual review - I don't agree that Google hates all affiliate sites.

In the recent round of Google slaps that were supposedly about landing page quality - AdwordsAdvisor explained what the slap was really about and it was geared toward certain types of affiliate sites.

Read about it here:

Google Mass Bans & Warns AdWords Advertisers, But Why?

Certain kinds of websites (ref1) are not allowed per our policies because the user experience is of low quality or we consistently receive negative feedback from our users about these kinds of pages. These sites include:


* Data collection sites that offer the false promise of free items, etc., in order to collect private information.


* Arbitrage sites that are designed for the purpose of showing ads

* Affiliates who provide limited value by being a bridge page with the intent of solely driving traffic to another site or who are framing an affiliate site

[nichenews]

Originally Posted by jitterbug978

wait a few weeks for a manual review then boom... slapped.

at least cloak your links.

Sure your sneaking by now, but just wait. It'll happen and then you'll realize Google really isnt that fond of affiliate offers.

What do you mean "manual review". They review your website when they approve your ads.

And I have another website full of affiliate links thats been going for around a year that hasn't been "slapped".

[Lucid]

This is the key sentence:

Affiliates who provide limited value by being a bridge page with the intent of solely driving traffic to another site or who are framing an affiliate site

In other words, sites like nichenews'. Direct linking is good, in fact, pretty much your only option.

So if I was nichenews or darkblue, I'd be worried and I'd do something about it. This slapping started sometime in July and seems to have intensified lately so obviously, it's not something they can do overnight.

[MemberWing]

I think what Google says makes sense - they don't want to encourage almost zero-value affiliate-ridden pages.

That didn't mean that i dont want to make money via affiliate marketing, so i decided to take matter in my own hands and created a Wordpress plugin that solved everything of a concern to affiliate marketer (my signature, and it's free full featured download - enjoy).
Basically instead of using different bits and pieces of software for cloaking - i created a single piece that takes care of redirection, cloaking, link shortening, tracking and even immunity from 'slap'.

Gleb

[Catalyst eMarketing]

Not sure how you can say your product offers immunity from the slap.

If this is part of what they are slapping "Affiliates who provide limited value by being a bridge page with the intent of solely driving traffic to another site" and if that's the kind of page an affiliate has, then link cloaking isn't going to help.

[MemberWing]

"value" or "intent" of a given website are vague concepts.
Of course if 50% of website are ads and links to other site - the value is probably limited.
If content is unique and rich - the value is "probably" better. Yet intense presence of affiliate links even on a content rich website - raises red flag in the eyes of search engines.
AFLinker took concept of eliminating affiliate links one step further than just creating of redirects or shortener URLs.

Gleb

Originally Posted by 5starAffiliatePrograms

Not sure how you can say your product offers immunity from the slap.

If this is part of what they are slapping "Affiliates who provide limited value by being a bridge page with the intent of solely driving traffic to another site" and if that's the kind of page an affiliate has, then link cloaking isn't going to help.

[Lucid]

> Not sure how you can say your product offers immunity from the slap.

I was thinking the same. I'm no web expert but I do know a little and seems to me there's two ways to "cloak" a link. One is to redirect your affiliate link to another of your pages which immediately redirects it to your affiliate. I think Google's software can be made smart enough to see through that rather easily.

The other way I can think of is that the link runs a PHP program which reads a database which handles the redirecting to the affiliate. You could have unlimited affiliate links this way hiding in a database file. It might be more difficult at this time for Google's software to figure out that's what you're doing, but it seems not impossible to overcome eventually. I think your HTML code would raise some flags as it would be unusual to do this. That's probably what Gleb is doing.