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Finding Affiliate Programs - 4 Time Saving Research Questions
When researching an affiliate program, there are a number of
questions you should ask before determining whether or not you
want to associate with a particular online merchant. However, to
save you time, there are four items you should...
Grow Your Business with Affiliate Marketing
Grow Your Business with Affiliate Marketing by J. Stephen Pope To generate additional business income, consider expanding your business through affiliate marketing. Here are three ways of boosting your business income with affiliate programs. ...
How To Cash In Promoting Affiliate Programs
1. Build your site around a topic you enjoy. Becoming a webmaster will require a lot of time on your part. Make sure that you first build your site around a topic that you enjoy and can spend time on. Think about what topics you enjoy most, and...
How To Get People To Click Your Affiliate Links
I was just having lunch with a friend of mine who is working on a new affiliate program. She seemed very excited about it, and as we ate our delicious cold lobster salad she gave me all the details. I began asking her a few questions, and as the...
How to Succeed in Affiliate Marketing?
The reason more and more people are interested in Affiliate
Marketing business is there are no bosses to order the employees
around, There are no deadlines to meet and no fixed timings or
schedule to follow. One only needs to be equipped with the...
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Google's Secret Guidelines On Thin Affiliates
Journalist Henk van Ess has caused a flurry of excitement on blogs and forums.
In his blog he revealed that Google uses teams of humans all over the world to evaluate the accuracy of Google's search results.
These "international agents", who are paid $10 to $20 an hour, were recruited mainly through universities. They're paid to check search results at Google every day.
Don't be distracted by the debate over whether Google should be doing this.
Of course it should. It's just a form of quality control.
Google can use the evaluators' findings to tweak its algorithms and reduce search engine spam.
What affiliates need to pay careful attention to is Google's "Spam Recognition Guide for Raters", which Henk revealed.
If you're a "thin affiliate," beware.
Although the report is a year old, about 80% of its contents are still being used by Google's evaluators, Henk says.
The confidential document gives us an unvarnished look at Google's attitude to affiliates.
If you're using any of the "manipulative techniques" Google describes, this report will probably encourage you to take a hard look at your website.
I hope you're not silly enough to be using hidden links or hidden text. Not surprisingly, Google teaches its "raters" how to detect them.
Are you creating pages without much content with the aim of collecting pay-per-click (PPC) revenue? Google's raters are taught to mark such pages as "Offensive", and gives examples.
Google secret guidelines spend some time discussing different ways in which some affiliates display results from pay-per-click search engines, so if you're doing that, you'll definitely want to study this report carefully.
Are you displaying ads disguised as search engine results? Google finds them offensive.
Are you adding a dmoz.org feed to your site with the aim of earning PPC revenue? That's "offensive", too.
Google says:
"We differentiate between affiliates that produce extra service, value, or content, and those that simply are duplicates of other sites, set up to boost traffic to other sites and earn a commission for it. The former ones are not Offensive and should be rated on the merits to the query. The latter ones
are Offensive... "Thin affiliate doorways are sites that usher people to a number of Affiliate programs, earning a commission for doing so, while providing little or no value-added content or service to the user. A site certainly has the right to try to earn income; we're attempting to identify sites that do nothing but act as a commission-earning middleman."
To Google, affiliate links such as qksrv.net, bfast.com and myaffiliateprogram.com - on the page or in redirects - "strongly suggest" that the site is a thin affiliate.
Are you using an affiliate datafeed? To Google, that's another warning sign.
However, if you offer a comparison of prices between different online merchants, you're OK, you're not a thin affiliate.
Google provides an incredibly tough guideline, which hundreds of thousands of affiliate sites fail to meet.
Google says:
"Do not call a page affiliate spam when an affiliation is only incidental to the message and purpose of a website. To determine whether participation in affiliate programs is central or incidental to the site's existence, ask yourself this question: Would this site remain a coherent whole if the pages leading to the affiliate (merchant) were taken away?"
That probably counts out most affiliate sites.
In summary, if you want to be friends with Google, make sure you provide extra value or content.
I've quoted only parts of the report. Any serious affiliate will want to study the whole thing carefully.
You can read the full report on Henk's blog here...
http://www.searchbistro.com/spamguide.doc
Note: A Google employee broke a non-disclosure agreement by revealing this report. I don't know how long it will stay online. You may want to do what I did - save a copy of it on your hard drive.
Now we know what Google really thinks of affiliates. You've been warned.
About the Author
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Allan Gardyne has been earning a very good living from affiliate programs since 1998. Learn from an affiliate veteran. Get his FREE newsletter... http://www.AssociatePrograms.com
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Affiliate network offering tracking and management solutions for maintaining an affiliate program. |
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Webmasters earn money with today's most effective online advertising technology, contextual advertising at a cost effective metric of CPC, PPC, CPM or CPV. |
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A searchable directory of rated affiliate programs. |
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Affiliate Summit 2007 West at Bally's Las Vegas, January 21-23, 2007. Keynote Speaker will be Michael Sanchez, CEO and Co-founder of ClubMom.com. |
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Affiliate Programs Marketing Training |
Most recent up-to-date developments in the affiliate marketing industry. ... The Affiliate Classroom is a step by step training program to help you easily ... |
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Affiliate Programs Directory - Affiliate Match.com |
Affiliate programs directory with searchable, categorized listings. |
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