So the big buzz for the past week is the anouncement on Perry Marshalls blog of a Google Slap to Affiliate review sites. So how did all this come about? Well Perry had received an email from Glenn Livingston which led to Perry publishing the following on his blog:

“I got word from several affiliate marketers that 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 build 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 else Google loves.

When we analyzed which pages survived, and we 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, and we should be advising clients towards a different business model… at minimum it seems necessary to avoid placing affiliate links on landing pages, but ideally, I think people need to move towards a deeper list building/relationship building strategy and/or a strong e-commerce model.Time to stop “building on sand”.”

So what does all this mean?

Well first off this only effects your google ads account, it hasn’t become part of googles search algorithum yet and it doesnt mean it will in the future. Low Quality scores in adwords, increases the price you pay for your ads so it does have a major effect on your income. I’ve checked my campaigns and I haven’t been hit yet but I do cloak my affiliate links, this doesnt mean I wont be hit in the future. I would definitely recommend cloaking your affiliate links in the mean time.

There are others who suggest  that it has nothing to do with naked affiliate links in your landing pages. Mark Ling from Affilorama suggests the slap is is more based on onpage optimisation:

The common theme that I’ve noticed has tended to be more to do with the on page optimization of the landing page. I’ve found that when I use Traffic Travis and run a page analysis on any keyword phrase that got slapped, I find that the page that it was directing traffic to received a B- or lower as the rating.

Below I’ve included an interview between Alex Goad and the man who brought this slap to everyones attention Dr. Glenn Livingston.

Have you been affected by the slap? Let me know in the comments.

So here’s the code :  web06250925

I really like the targeting buckets of MySpace, they have refined their demographic targeting right down to what colour underwear your wearing!! You can choose to target by marital status, occupation, interests, hobbies, right down to the football teams you support. My other favourite thing about MyAds is the cost, the traffic is a lot cheaper than google, you can pick up traffic for as little as 1c.

So have fun with your free $25 and remember try and grow it using affiliate marketing!!

PPC Web Spy

PPC Web Spy is a firefox plugin that will show you the destination url of any adwords. It will allow you to spot affiliate urls in PPC Advertising. In the below example I’ve highlighted where it’s showing an affiliate url:

The next nice feature is you can view some of the other keywords they are bidding on:

In the above example it shows that the affiliates are using direct linking, where they aren’t using their own landing pages, the next tool I’m going to show you will allow you to analyse an affiliates landing page:

SpyFu.com

SpyFu.com allows you to analyse an affiliates landing page and see what keywords they are bidding on and what they are spending in google adwords on a daily basis. For this example I’m going to use an affiliate website I came across call getdietsolutions.com.

When we put this site into SpyFu we get the following results:

Now straight away we can see that this is a big affiliate, they are spending between $500-$2500 daily and they have a keyword list of over a 1,500. The free version of spyfu only shows 10 keywords but the paid version will allow us access to all the keywords.

I hope you find these tools useful. If you know of any other tools as good as these please leave a comment!