Google’s Relationship With Affiliates

Love:

–          Affiliate marketers were some of Google’s earliest advertisers. By matching commercial offers with keywords and attracting merchants to search marketing, affiliates helped build AdWords as the largest online advertising portal in the world.

–          Google utilize the affiliate marketing model via comparison ads in the finance vertical. Google has also suggested they might move to a price-per-booking model with hotels.

–          Google invested in viglink, an affiliate program that pays sites owners for generating targeted traffic to merchant sites.

–          Google invested in Whaleshark media, the self-proclaimed “world’s leading marketplace for coupons and deals”.

–          Google bought out BeatThatQuote.com, a UK financial comparison site.

–          For large merchants like Amazon, Google runs product search affiliate ads.

–          Google is testing the insertion of pre-filled lead generation forms directly into the search results.

–          Google’s Adsense program is the largest affiliate network, paying publishers to syndicate Adsence ads across the web. In addition, Google runs another Affiliate network named “Google Affiliate Network”.

–          The Google remove rater document that was leaked earlier this year highlights the following website classification as being legitimate for affiliate sites:

1. Price comparison
2. Coupons
3. Original in-depth editorial reviews

Hate  

–          In Q4 of 2009 Google banned 30,000+ Affiliate Adwords accounts without any warning or justification.

–          Ex post factor: Some affiliates are not able to restore their Adwords account without improving “landing page quality” on 3rd party sites the affiliates never controlled, for ads they ran year ago, before Google’s policies changed.

These affiliate advertiser have, in effect, a lifetime ban because they don’t have control over the web properties.

–          Linking through to certain products on certain affiliate networks can lead to an Adworks account being automatically banned.

Google does not disclose which networks are problematic, thus leaving affiliates guessing as to which products they can and cannot promote.

–          Affilaite = Unnecessary

Affiliate Summit in 2010, Google’s Frederick valleys stated that affiliates were largely “just an unnecessary step in the sales funnel”. He went on to say that Google prefers affiliates link directly to merchant websites.

–          Google has taken several efforts to remove affiliate marketers from the organic search results:

1. Google strengthened duplicate content filters to eliminate feed-driven affiliate sites.
2. Google banned many affiliates running of sites, calling them “doorway pages”
3. In some cases, Google later inserted their own vertical search listings in these same search results, thus removing affiliates from the search results so google could generate more revenue.

–          Google’s remove rater documents explicitly instruct rater into designating affiliate sites in the travel niche as spam, even if they’d otherwise get a high rating for usefulness and quality.

–          Google’s reconsideration request form states, “In general, sites that directly profit from traffic (e.g. search engine optimization, Affiliate programs, etc.) may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reconsidered.”

–          Eric Schmidt frequently highlights the power of the web’s ability to allow you to merge without merging.

However, when an author linked to his own book’s page on Amazon via an affiliate link, his Adwords account was disabled. Google also sells ebooks and offers their own affiliate program!