On July 21st, Perry Marshall published an email conversation he had with Dr.Glenn Livingston concerning the dramatic quality score devaluation of Affiliate Review Sites containing bare affiliate links.
I interviewed Glenn on the extent of this “slap”, who it affects, how to work around it and some keys to bullet proofing your business for the future…
Click play to listen to Dr.Livingston’s enlightening answers:
Here is the excerpt from Perry Marshall’s blog that started it all:
“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”.”
Note that Perry goes on to comment further and the article is definitely worth reading…
Here are the free Adwords Resources Glenn Livingston generously provides during the call:
- Very insightfull 90 minute presentation on negative keywords
- Quick Adwords Audio on content network secrets
- Glenn Livingston’s Blog (tons of free adwords tips)
Glenn is the CEO of Rocketclicks.com, a cutting edge search engine optimization and Pay per Click Management firm.
I will be updating this post with a full written transcript of the interview as soon as it is completed. Thanks for sharing your comments or feedback in the box below.
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