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Google slap 2 just arrived

by Blade Runner 77
19 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I have a skin care product I've been thinking about selling, today I received this advice to affiliate sellers from them; the second google slap we've been expecting has arrived;

Google slap 2
saturday aug 7th 09

You may have heard Google dropped the hammer today on affiliate review pages. Many
pages went from quality scores of 10 --> 1 overnight. And these were NOT skinny sites,
rather well built out, consistently updated blogs with good navigation above the fold, xml site
maps, high click through, hyper-relevant keyword mapping, low bounce rates, long average
time on page... everything that Google loves.

After talking to many SEO experts and analyzing which pages survived, I take it in
combination with other information, it seems pretty clear they've added code which screens
for affiliate links on the landing pages.

At the moment it seems cloaking and PHP redirects are untouched, but I can't imagine these
are far behind. (I'm guessing they're just avoiding this in order to decrease their server burden
... takes some CPU cycles to visit every link on the page and evaluate for affiliate code)

I'd say it's safe to conclude Google's on the war path against affiliate review sites with naked
affiliate links.

We've updated our affiliate software recently to have ability to use "DirectLinks". Your
affiliate link will not need to have any "ref" variable in order to track your referral. This way
your affiliate link on your site will not look like a typical affiliate link, thus flying under
Google's radar.

Also we recommend using "follow" tags/attributes when using "DirectLinks" since Google
advises "nofollow" tags have no practical importance to websites, unless to tell search engines
there isn't any valuable information there. However, to make it congruent to both visitors and
search engines, using "follow" tags is suggested and will be a benefit to your website which
indicates to search engines the relevancy of your and our content.


In the meantime though I've been updating my site and not using google ads except to display them. Is there any chance google slap 2 might affect them indexing my site, not just raising the cost of placing ads on google? thanks RJW
#arrived #google #slap
  • Profile picture of the author Daniel Brock
    I have noticed a similar effect and am now avoiding putting affiliate links on all my pages.

    I also am working on alternative traffic sources so that I never even have to worry about being slapped by Google. After experimenting, I have finally realized that Google is not your only source for traffic. There are many equally as important parts that you can work on.

    I still think this is a little absurd of them to do though. I mean I can understand trying to filter out the millions of SPAM sites, but for penalizing a site only because it promotes an affiliate program is taking it too far.
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    • Profile picture of the author anwar001
      Originally Posted by dbbrock1 View Post

      I have noticed a similar effect and am now avoiding putting affiliate links on all my pages.

      I also am working on alternative traffic sources so that I never even have to worry about being slapped by Google. After experimenting, I have finally realized that Google is not your only source for traffic. There are many equally as important parts that you can work on.

      I still think this is a little absurd of them to do though. I mean I can understand trying to filter out the millions of SPAM sites, but for penalizing a site only because it promotes an affiliate program is taking it too far.
      May I know what other traffic sources we can have apart from Google which can provide healthy amount of traffic? I would be very interested in gaining as much traffic from varied sources as possible.
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  • Profile picture of the author Blade Runner 77
    re numbers, my account opened that way and I don't know how to change it.
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  • Profile picture of the author rlscott2
    This has been on the cards for ages. Most people who saw this coming switched to cloaking and PHP redirects a long time ago. I'm sure there are programmers working on more sophisticated solutions for the future. Someone always comes up with a solution to these type of problems.
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  • Profile picture of the author Zeus66
    Don't forget that Google is probably feeling the effects of the downturn in the economy worldwide. They have this little program called.... what was it again? Oh yeah, ADWORDS! Don't think they're above doing some ruthless sh*t to preserve their bottom line. Taking a chain saw to sites with affiliate links on them just happens to reduce the money being made through Google's organic search results for a lot of major keywords.

    But oh yes, Google has an alternative. Just pay them for all that traffic instead and your life and business will sail right on.

    Paranoid? Maybe a little, but do you really think this hasn't at least come up in private discussions among top Google leadership vis a vis the poor economy?

    John
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    • Profile picture of the author BrianMcLeod
      Originally Posted by Zeus66 View Post

      But oh yes, Google has an alternative. Just pay them for all that traffic instead and your life and business will sail right on.

      Paranoid? Maybe a little, but do you really think this hasn't at least come up in private discussions among top Google leadership vis a vis the poor economy?
      The slap warning being reposted by the OP is actually specifically about AdWords, not organic listings -*hence the reference to Quality Score plummeting overnight.

      This is not to say that organic serps are not also being weighted in the same way... in fact, I have every reason to believe that they ARE.

      Still, the warning above is about PPC campaigns built around affiliate review sites.

      Best,

      Brian
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      • Profile picture of the author snapper
        I don't think Google worry too much about upesetting their adwords advertisers - they are more concerned about providing a good 'searching experience', because they know that if they attract searchers to their search engine the advertisers will always follow.

        Also how many niches have advertisers that go 3, 4 - 10 pages long, so if half of those advertisers drop off, are they going to lose too much money...not likely because the advertisers on page 3 are spending tiny amounts.

        All us adwords advertisers are better off providing the best possible 'searcher experience' that we can because that is what Google are looking for, therefore if you work with them it can only work to your advantage. You can try and find sneaky ways around Google rules, but they are always going to win the war...until MSN or Yahoo or whoever get their act together and threaten the dominance of Google.

        But if Google continue to provide the best 'searcher experience' then they make it harder for competition (Yahoo, MSN) to beat them.

        Bottom line is - for the immediate to medium term, you are better off abiding by the rules rather than trying to be sneaky.
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      • Profile picture of the author Zeus66
        Originally Posted by BrianMcLeod View Post

        The slap warning being reposted by the OP is actually specifically about AdWords, not organic listings -*hence the reference to Quality Score plummeting overnight.

        This is not to say that organic serps are not also being weighted in the same way... in fact, I have every reason to believe that they ARE.

        Still, the warning above is about PPC campaigns built around affiliate review sites.

        Best,

        Brian
        Ahh, I stand corrected. Serves me right for taking a pot shot at Big G.

        John
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  • Profile picture of the author Ken Nubo
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    • Profile picture of the author Wilter Quesada
      Originally Posted by Ken Nubo View Post

      If Google ever slapped me, I'll kick her out of the house and use her sister, Yahoo.
      God that make me laugh so much that I cant type straight too funny man thanks I need it that one.
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  • Profile picture of the author TheRichJerksNet
    Also we recommend using "follow" tags/attributes when using "DirectLinks" since Google advises "nofollow" tags have no practical importance to websites, unless to tell search engines there isn't any valuable information there. However, to make it congruent to both visitors and search engines, using "follow" tags is suggested and will be a benefit to your website which indicates to search engines the relevancy of your and our content.
    I am not sure who gave you this advice but all links are "do follow" unless specified "no follow" ...lol No follow and do follow means nothing but I just wanted to point out whoever told you to include a rel=follow tag with your links has no idea what they are talking about.

    By the way google is the only search engine that cares about do follow/no follow - No other search engine uses those tags and they are ignored.

    James
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  • Profile picture of the author Jason Dolman
    Originally Posted by 105724 View Post

    Also we recommend using "follow" tags/attributes when using "DirectLinks" since Google
    advises "nofollow" tags have no practical importance to websites, unless to tell search engines
    there isn't any valuable information there. However, to make it congruent to both visitors and
    search engines, using "follow" tags is suggested and will be a benefit to your website which
    indicates to search engines the relevancy of your and our content.
    Bad advice.

    Paid links - Webmasters/Site owners Help

    Google wants to see all paid links with the rel="nofollow" attribute and since your affiliate links are paid links, you should be making them "nofollow" links so that PageRank is not passed to the vendor site.



    Jason
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  • Profile picture of the author pdjsolutions
    what i believe is that google traffic is never as targetted as traffic from other sources, be it affiliates, or other website which think that our content is Quality.

    Therefore my advice to all of you is, stop getting worried with google slap and start finding others sources of traffic, spend more time on getting traffic from other quality websites which is sure to be more targetted than google.


    Prateek.
    PDJSolutions.
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  • Profile picture of the author Quentin
    Well my opinion is that if you are depending on Google for all your traffic then you deserve to get slapped around a bit.

    Marketing is all about developing numerous ways for people to find you and Google should be a small percentage of this strategy.

    Quentin
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    • Profile picture of the author Matt Bard
      Originally Posted by Quentin View Post

      Marketing is all about developing numerous ways for people to find you and Google should be a small percentage of this strategy.
      Quentin
      I just wanted people to see this again. Maybe plant some seeds in their heads to think about.

      Seems like all of these businesses nowadays are built on Google.

      Quentin, you and I remember the days before there was a Google

      Matt
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  • Profile picture of the author rapidscc
    I have two sites that I tried to put in the first page of google for very competitive keywords.

    Both Includes affiliate links.

    The first site includes 4 affiliate links and about 10 informative articles.
    The other one is a single page site with 5 affiliate links..

    The first site is currently no. 3 in the first page. I'm searching from the Philippines, here it shows that I've dominated that spot for that keyword.

    The other one can't be seen anywhere..

    I've done the same SEO techniques.

    My theory is, the slap only applies to those review pages that contains nothing except a few texts and a ton of affiliate links..

    For those that contains contents that are probably also indexed, it should not make any difference..

    This theory was reached based on my test. The case maybe different with others..

    To Your Success,

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  • Profile picture of the author dotcompals
    is it better to remove my affiliate links from other unrelated sites?
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  • Profile picture of the author dynameek
    Hmmm...interesting! I got slapped with the first one and it took me ages to recover. I'm glad to have picked this up here before I become a victim again. Thank you very much for sharing. This will help...
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  • Profile picture of the author hitesh93
    Okay, time to clarify the affiliate slap:

    I believe (based on my tests and observation across 100+ sites) - The affiliate links are a small change made to account for sites that may provide biased content that is not accurate. I believe Google is simply adding a penalty to sites that are 'Product Name + Review' based and also carry and affiliate link to 'Product' within the text. This makes it biased in their opinion (I think they're off their rocker since Google.com recommends Google Adwords and in a sense it is its own biggest affiliate).

    However, this penalty is BIG on PPC and relatively minor for the SEO aspects. If your site is overall very well optimized, and has good linking, you may just make it through with just a drop of at most a rank or two (at most).
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