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.

Audio Version of Post  

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

Popularity: 17% [?]

One thing I hate about building sites targeting multiple locations is checking the serps manually in each region. The thought of manually altering the address bar from google.com to .co.uk or .com.au just irratates me.  It is such a mundane task that it should be automated and now thanks to Dave Davis and the fabulous team at Redfly Marketing it has been.

Redfly Marketing have developed a firefox plugin called Google Global. Google Global now allows you to view organic and paid Google search results as they appear in almost any location on Earth.

Some of the Features of Google Global:

• View paid and organic search results as they appear in different cities.
• View paid and organic search results as they appear in different regions.
• Open all results from countries, cities and regions in multiple tabs for easy comparison.
• View paid and organic search results from a specific IP address.
• View paid and organic search results from any US ZIP code.
• View paid and organic search results from different language results pages.
• Custom advanced saved searches.

How to use Google Global

The easiest way to use Google Global is to simply do a search for something on Google. When you see you search results page, simply right click anywhere on the search results page, select “Search Google Global” and select what geographic location you would like to see the results from. It is as simple as that.

Get Google Global

To get Google Global, just click this link

Popularity: 7% [?]

John Chow the reknowned internet entrepreneur has finally decided to play nice with google. John Chow for those of you who don’t know is one of the first bloggers to succesfully make money online through his blog. He has taken his blog from earning nothing to earning hundreds of thousands a year. How did he do it? He used every medium available to him, email marketing, twitter, banner ads, text link ads and paid posts.

Now theres a lot of bitching on the internet about John Chow, some say he’d sell his grandmother for a few bucks. I don’t buy into this, in my opinion you can’t knock what he has achieved and those that do I reckon are not jealous of his income from affiliate marketing but more of his notoriety on the internet. He is basically one of the poster boys for Affiliate Marketing.

Having said that, this is probably the reason that Google decided to make an example of him in 2007 for his paid posts and text link ads. Google don’t like paid posts or text link ads, it messes with their system and they consider it spam. In 2007 Google decided to penalise JohnChow.com and pulled it’s rankings. Basically JohnChow.com couldn’t rank for anything including his own name. Google did fix it a few months later but the ranking for his internal pages never fully recovered.

So what has he done now? He has created a duplicate site to JohnChow.com at JohnChow.ca, removed all the items considered spam by Google and he has 301 redirected googlebot from JohnChow.com to this site.

Why has he done this now? Well Google seem to be cracking down on Affiliate Marketing and paid posts, there is the recent situation with Matt Cutts unfollowing Shoemoney on Twitter due to paid tweets and perhaps John is trying to smooth things over with Google to get ahead of this. The other reason I suspect is for testing purposes. After it was anounced on Shoemoney.com that John Chow had done this, there was a lot of speculation that John would be hit with a duplicate content penalty. Well a couple of weeks earlier I read an interesting post on SEOMoz that google anounced that there wouldn’t be a duplicate content penalty for using identical content when geotargeting which is exactly what John is doing. This is I suspect Johns main reasoning and he’s trying to raise his readership numbers by using geotargeting but you decide!

Popularity: 3% [?]

I just noticed when checking the site that Google has finally assigned PageRank for the site. We are now a PageRank 4, a very respectable number for a blog that has been running for less than a month.

If you don’t know what PageRank is, PageRank is a number between 1-10 assigned to your site which classes how authorative your site is. The higher the PageRank, the better. PageRank is actually assigned to every page on your website. Usually your home page will have the highest PageRank, as in our case where our homepage is a 4 but a lot of our internal pages have been assigned a PageRank of 2.

Given the fact we’ve been assigned PageRank and do offer “do follow”, it makes it a no brainer for somebody link building to participate in the comments on this site!!

Popularity: 3% [?]

Let me start off by stating that this is a new blog, it’s been up a little over a week. Since it’s a new blog which we havent actively promoted it yet so our traffic is quite low around about 20 uniques a day.

You can imagine my surprise last week when I logged into Google Analytics and seen that the sites traffic had jumped over 500% in one nite to 130 uniques.

Now this was all down to one post we put up on our blog last week about Facebook Personal URL’s becoming available.

Google Analyitcs

Google Analytics

So What Have I Learned from this?

Blogging about topical trends or events can have a huge influence over your traffic. So if there is an upcoming event for your niche, even if your not going to it, blog about it.

Let me know if you’ve had any similar situations on your blog in the comments.

Popularity: 1% [?]