Matt Cutts bitch slaps Affiliate Marketers

Matt Cutts has an interesting post on his blog of a presentation he gave at WordCamp San Francisco 2009. It’s a good presentation for anybody interested in SEO for blogs, specifically wordpress.

In fact a good chunk of the presentation is devoted to wordpress, and if your new to blogging or affiliate marketing and are planning to use wordpress for your cms, definitely check it out above.

Now as much as I love wordpress, this is an affiliate marketing blog, so I want to discuss the slides that seem to be aimed at this area. Now what you’ll notice is that slides 42-44 seem to be aimed at the affiliate marketing industry.

Now unfortunately the video of the presentation isn’t up so I can’t see what he actually said during these slides but from the looks of the presentation he wasn’t painting it in a good light. Slide 42 & 43 seem to show two typical “Make Money Online” landing pages, albeit specifically aimed at making money from google. Like I said this is only an assumption so I’m not going to pay too much attention to them but what did catch my eye was slide 44.

Why did Slide 44 catch my eye?

Well in Slide 44 he deals with paid posts for blogs. It actually states

Avoid Paid Posts:
He recommends not to do paid posts that:
contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites.

Now what makes this interesting is that on June 12th Matt Cutts publicaly tweeted on twitter that he was unfollowing Jeremy “Shoemoney” Shoemaker because of a sponsored tweet he did.

Now what does all this mean? I’m not sure to be honest but I suspect Google have affiliate marketers in their sights and will be cracking down in the next few months. Let me know what your opinion is in the comments.

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8 Comments For This Post

  1. Helen | YourChristmasGifts.co.ukNo Gravatar Says:

    I don’t think this was really aimed at affiliate marketers tbh. I think the gist was that you should avoid really spammy get rich quick sites – which should be obvious really.?

    I’m constantly amazed by the number of affiliates who have a paranoia that Google doesn’t like affiliates. I have to laugh when so many seasoned ‘expets’ advise newbies to mask their links so Google can’t tell what they are.
    In other words – put yourself in breach of one of the most important guidelines (don’t show search engines and users different content) because Google hates sites that make money :)

    Google hates rubbish sites and, unfortuneatly, a lot of affiliate sites fall into this category because they are rubbish – and not for any other reason!

  2. LeoNo Gravatar Says:

    Hi Helen, I do feel that Google are coming down on Affiliate Marketers who do paid posts or sell text link ads but agree with you that most penalties will be to thin affiliate sites

  3. payasNo Gravatar Says:

    Since i got involved with affiliate marketing a few years back, theres allways been scare mongering within the affiliate community about Google.

    So i decided to avoid paying for any kind of links etc and opted to use other more google freindly activities.

  4. LeoNo Gravatar Says:

    Hey Darren, its always best to stick to googles guidelines. Link Building is always a pain but its better than getting banned for buying links!

  5. payasNo Gravatar Says:

    I agree it can be a pain, but from what ive read targeting affiliates for buying links is biased as large organisations do it and get away with it all the time.

    what if the links purchased actualy provide Googles users with a better experience, isnt this what Google preaches about.

  6. LeoNo Gravatar Says:

    I don’t think they are targeting Affiliate Marketers for buying links but they are definitely coming down on paid posts

  7. Rob | Travel AffiliateNo Gravatar Says:

    Of course paid posts will be penalised – these are cutting Google Adwords out of the deal.

    An affiliate that has good, unique content shouldn’t have anything to worry about…. I hope ;)

  8. MattNo Gravatar Says:

    Probably more likely Google has affiliate marketers in their sights that aren’t running Google Aff Network offers, or get in the way of their new CPA-driven product listings that are in beta for integration in the natural search results.

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