Part I: Google Adwords hate Affiliates?

June 11, 2007

There is a discussion from Google adwords advertisers that they have been ranking from Great to poor in less than 24 hours. Some advertisers said that what is happening now is a way Google saying that “we hate affiliates”, but reading and searching a little more about Google Adwords Support it clearly states the following:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=66361

There is no problem in being an affiliate as long as you create some added value for your users and produce valuable content that gives a user a reason to visit your site.

Google does not hate Affiliates. What Google hates is “no content” or/and “No unique content”. But still the problem continues an advertiser claim the following:

I would say that the content on the pages is very useful and totally unique on the internet.. No one else is doing what I’m doing and consumers love it..

I really think it is the outgoing links they don’t like..

Remember Google adwords do not use the sophisticated GoogleBot this is an Adbot that is build with a basic algorithm. They don’t like pages with tons of outgoing links. In another point of view Someone said that they were told by Google that in some cases the slap was a result of manual reviews of the landing page by a human rather than a bot. But do you think that google will “waste” their time to review manually some of your ads?:

I doubt it.. That’s sort of a subjective thing.. Also, Google has always held the philosophy that human intervention is too costly and therefore they have always used an algorithm to get rid of spam and other undesirable elements.

Also, my comparison shopping site was just too well put together and too valuable of a consumer resource for a human to slap it..

In the worst case scenario .. If some human didn’t like your site and they slapped it, just reg a new domain, upload and resubmit.. It will be quite a while before another human gets around to manually critiquing your site.. It seems very unlikely humans are involved in this. Adwords is pitifully understaffed.. It takes weeks upon weeks in certain countries just to get an ad group reviewed..

Some reasons why Google is doing this:
- Google adwords is hitting everyone who doesn’t sell something directly.
- Google adwords is trying to increase the min bid for those keywords that convert well? Is all about business at the end no?
- Google AdWords has indeed tweaked its landing pages algorithm lately. Its nothing new though, this has been going on for at least 18 months to 2 years and is an ever evolving process.

Basically if you create a landing page with no unique content and the sole purpose of sending visitors to another site, then AdWords will penalise you.

For those of you hoping that this is just a temporary technical issue, it is *not*. I spent an hour on the phone yesterday with a Google Adwords customer service rep, and she said that yes, they have made changes again to the Landing Page Quality guidelines and therefore pushed several advertisers out of the PPC listings with hyperinflated ($5, $10) bids. She could not give me a definitive answer on whether it’s an algo or a human that reviews sites during a major change like this one and last July’s. I pressed her on this. She said she thinks it’s a combination of the two but doesn’t know.

More bad news is that she said it is still being rolled out, and potentially more people will get whacked over the next few days (but she couldn’t give me an actual timeline estimate).

I really pressed her on the question of Google targeting affiliates. She even put me on hold to talk to someone supposedly in the know to get me an answer. She came back and said that they do not systematically target affiliates as a whole, nor sites with affiliate links. But, she said they are taking more steps with each landing page tweak to weed out sites that do not add a certain level of “value” to their visitors (as other posters to this thread have mentioned). She wouldn’t tell me if this “value” is human-determined or algo-determined, again saying that she didn’t know.

I had her check several of my sites, and she put me on hold each time to check with some kind of editorial “specialist” at AdWords, and the result was that all of those checked sites were apparently not up to par with what they require. Not enough unique content. Not enough pages with different content. Too much on one page. “Try breaking your original content up over several pages so it’s more readable.” I’m an affiliate, and I admit that my landing pages are concise and single-paged (though they all have original content, written by me) and I don’t have several pages per product/partner merchant. Why would I expend that kind of effort for each of my merchants when I’m simply trying to pre-sell and not get in my visitor’s way as they go to the merchant’s site to browse and hopefully buy?

This is what Google is getting rid of. Simple pre-sell landing pages are not good enough for their PPC listings any more. The Google rep pretty much agreed on this point. As an advertiser, you’ll need a great deal of unique content on each merchant you’re promoting and therefore each site and landing page. Presumably, only “super-affiliates” will be allowed to bid next to the actual merchants, going forward. Those that have a very content-heavy comparison website, or content-heavy in-depth site describing the products and the merchant in great detail, and (presumably) updated frequently. And of course if merchants themselves who use AdWords PPC don’t provide much information besides a shopping cart and listings, they’ll probably end up being whacked too.

So it comes down to original content, original content, original content. And plenty of it. Which Google can somehow objectively determine a minimum numerical value of that is “good enough for their visitors” using algorithms. “Original” and “unique” being key terms here. And by the way, if you as an affiliate use web templates that your merchant partner has provided to you (and if others are also using this so it looks similar to other sites or the merchant’s site itself), as in a couple cases I did, then the bot sees you as not being unique, and whacks you.

Bottom line: If You’re An Affiliate, You Must Become A “Super-Affiliate” To Use Google AdWords. Heed these words, think about them, decide if you want to expend that much effort to play Google’s game.

Being a high-volume affiliate with many merchant relationships to diversify your portfolio, and decent but not very voluminous landing pages, is not going to fly with Google’s PPC. Simple pre-sell landing pages just won’t work, no matter how honest and relevant to the product they are. You’re going to need to do pretty much what you must do to get high organic results, in my opinion, to stay in Google’s PPC game. That is, design SEO’d sites with tons of unique content that can pass some kind of “quality” algorithm that Google will not provide any clearly defined ranking system for to help you with your development. And who knows what’s next? Perhaps, to completely break down the barrier between organic and paid, G could require an unspecified number of inbound links to your PPC website as part of the formula for “quality”.

All of this means as an affiliate you’ll probably have to narrow your field and become an authority on one or two niches rather than promoting in volume, if you want to use AdWords. That, or hire a horde of good content writers and web designers. No one can be a super-affiliate web content writer, advertiser, marketer, and PPC maintainer, for more than a couple products/niches at once and still get more than 15 minutes of sleep a week.

Part 2 will be published Soon (Approx 4 hours).