Google Changes Send Affiliates Scrambling

If you’re using pay per click marketing and if you’ve been doing so for any length of time you know that Google Adwords is really, the only game in town if you want fast, significant traffic. You’ll also know that setting up a Google campaign is quite complicated due to the fact that Google has a number of rules that you’re supposed to play by but they don’t really make those rules obvious anywhere. As a result it is a challenging game to play.

Once in a while Google will also change these rules and shake up an entire industry without any warning. We sometimes call this the Google Slap. It wasn’t too long ago that you could just put up a one page website to capture sales leads and send traffic to is using Adwords. Unfortunately, those days are long gone and Google now makes it very clear that your site must offer “value” to visitors in order to gain a decent quality score from Google. This makes Adwords even more challenging for affiliate marketers.

Not too long ago, Google moistened its palm and gave a good whack to affiliates once again. This time the unfortunate targets seemed to be review-type sites where the owner or the visitors to the site review and discuss products and services within a particular market. The site contains affiliate links and if anyone happens to click through those links and make a purchase, the owner of the site gets paid a referral commission.

In any event, it seems that this week Google has changed their algorythms again and this time they are looking for Adwords advertisers that are driving traffic to these affiliate review pages or any type of landing page obviously promoting affiliate products. It seems a strange tactic by Google considering that affiliate marketing is such a huge part of online marketing and also that Google itself runs its own affiliate network.

But what is done is done. The question now becomes, what can affiliates do about it?

I can’t speak for everyone but what I’m doing seems to be working very well. You can see for yourself by clicking the link below.

About the Author. Eric Haaranen is the author of Nice People Can Sell and the owner of ModernSalesProspecting.com. His latest project involves building a community to review internet marketing tools and helping website owners find the best solutions for their businesses. You can learn more about Eric’s seo services by visiting his blog.