Google AdWords Slap on Review Sites?
| Share |
Yesterday Perry Marshall made a post “Google Slap for Product Review Sites” and first of all if you are into AdWords or PPC marketing, you WANT to listen to Perry.
Now the purpose of this post is to calm a few people.
- No Google is not killing everything.
- Yes you might need to change what your doing.
Basically what happened is people with well-established accounts saw quality scores of 10 drop to 1. These where excellent looking sites that seemed to have everything going right.
Well that is not completely true!
One thing that I learned a long time ago was Google hates affiliate links and it turns out that the people that got hammered were the sites that used direct affiliate links… those that cloaked their links went untouched (so far)… whew, I am keeping my fingers crossed.
Now, does this mean you are safe if you use cloaked links?
You would have to ask Google that but I can tell you one thing… I would not (and do not) feel totally safe… but I am also not panicking
Here are a 5 Simple Things you can do… in my opinion… to help yourself.
- Do NOT direct link with your affiliate link, if you do then make sure it is not the only outgoing link on your page. I advise all links be cloaked… yes ALL AFFILIATE LINKS!
- Put other links to high authority sites on your page… you can make them not very noticeable. Google wants you to provide value and if you are linking to related and high authority resources, then Google seems to like that. If you are promoting a health product for example, find some related content at WebMD, Wikipedia and other very popular sites. Do not worry that you will lose clicks, put the links low on the page and if the top section of your page does not make the call to action more desirable then the link to WebMD; you have bigger things to worry about.
- Link to other pages on your site, not just the legal pages (privacy and disclaimer)… or other PPC pages but put good solid content on your site, promote it (so it is indexed) and link to the content (solid content) that is on your site.
- If you are using a landing page script like LPBlitz (PPCKahuna Tool), make sure you identify the pages that are your big money makers (the keywords) and actually link to those pages from content as well (yes link to the actual landing page). You do not want to link to all your top landing pages all in one blog post, put you can put a few in each posts (I recommend at the bottom).
- Use common sense (yes I know it is not common to everyone): Google is a business that wants to offer value to its users and in their eyes; sites that are full of affiliate links are not true review sites (and 95% of the time they are correct). Think SEO with your landing pages, Google does not like pages full of affiliate links when it comes to SEO and so it is no wonder they do not like them in PPC.
One tool that helps with the old authority links, at least on blogs is Zemanta. Been using it for a while. It suggests them and you just click them to add.
Hi john,
Thanks very much for the post and tips. YOU have made the things clear and gave us some hope. I new YOU will come up with YOUR great strategy to find the way out !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! All the best.
These 5 tips are very logical and great. Truth is they should be done even without a google slap.
And let’s be honest, if you really care about customers and not just fungolas (money) then take time to build and add valuable useful content.
We all know why people search, let’s cater to our clients and give them real value not just a pish-posh of affiliate links.
Thanks again for this great post.
Hey, thanks for the tips. This is very useful!
Wrong move. Cloaking affiliate links will even get you into deeper mud with Google. As far as Google is concerned, they don’t like people to ‘no’ be aware of the link they’re actually clicking. SO I guess, the right answer is, affiliate link moderation.
You say… “Cloaking affiliate links will even get you into deeper mud with Google.” .. i need to ask you “according to who?”
Do you have proof of that yourself or are you just reciting something?
I have loads of ppc review sites out there and so do my buddies who cloak their links (iframes, 301 redirects, php redirects and so on) and none of us got touched that do that. Looks like proof to me… where is your proof on your statement.
Hey John great post, I have been cloaking aff links on my sites for awhile and so far no issues with Google, or Adwords.
Cloaking has the added benefit of security on your links and income,, so cloak..cloak now..lol
John! I never thought of this things, I will put caution to be in situation.
Thanks
hey this is a great post. i don’t knew those things but but your post helped me a lot. there been always problem for the websites which uses affiliate links but we can sort out some of this problem by implementing your tips. thanks for this post… good luck.
I have been fortunate so far. I have plenty of affiliate links on my site, yet my quality score still runs high (maybe because my site is a service, offering a real search to job seekers? Don’t know).
Thanks for sharing your insights. I was just thinking about it and lo and behold – I got my answer.
Oh man…I’ve finally got the nerve to start pushing affiliate sites with Adwords. There goes my fun…and to think I was hoping to buy a Pagani Zonda for myself with TONYROCKS painted on it
what if i have a single product blog and affiliate link on the page ? will that also effect my site ?
Make sure there are other links on the site and you should be ok… most review sites have multiple affiliate links.
I’ve seen comments on the original article’s site complaining about the spammy nature of review sites that are cluttering the index, and it’s relation to this slap. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this doesn’t seem to be related to traffic derived from non-Adwords sources.
By my reading, it’s only related to “arbitrage” in a sense; bid on the term “blue widgets”, someone clicks on your PPC link and they land on your site containing an affiliate link to a site that sells blue widgets.
Since your placement in the PPC queue is related to the quality score, if you don’t have a “high-value” page at that link (i.e. just a sell page and aff link), Google puts you at the bottom of the heap (quality=0).
Quality score isn’t the only metric used in placement but is a pretty big factor. Dropping from #1 to #8 in the PPC placement is what this slap seems to refer to. Even bidding higher won’t offset the lower quality assignment.
So affiliate links on SEO’ed pages for blue widgets, even if a crappy one, shouldn’t be affected at all. Again, tell me if I’m way off base here.
Well personally i have experienced a couple years ago that google turfed sites of mine that had loads of outgoing affiliate links from their rankings. Some completely deindexed. I have to admit these where packed full of affiliate links… since i stopped doing that i have ever had a site drop out of the index.
I truly believe that AdWords and SEO, as far as landing pages go, are getting closer in similarity. Just like google does not want the same results appear (even on different domains) in the organic listings, they also want the same for paid listings… the problem is with billions of ads they need an auto detect method… and this is one example of it.
You know I honestly believe that Google likes to scare people as well. They do something like this and give it a bit of a push to put the scare of banishment in people… causes people to focus on quality more.
Looks to me like Google is starting to give preference to sites that mainly incorporate it’s own Adsense program which is an affiliate program itself… maybe it does’nt like the competition. Hmmmm… I mean, if affiliates are pulling high ranks organically, why would advertisers pay Google for Adwords when their getting free exposure through their affiliates anyway, right?
You really should’nt scare me like that. I’m Scared!
It’s a dog eat dog losing battle.
Ya it is kind of a funny thing… it is sometimes hard to remember too that they are a website that have the rights to show what they want and do not want to… and it does sometimes seem hypocritical but at the same time, they own it.
Some great tips on how to prevent and protect against this new issue. I’ve been looking at producing review sites for a while and am glad that I have held off so that I can ensure that they add genuine value and comply with these latest changes.
[...] Your page is on StumbleUpon [...]
“Put other links to high authority sites on your page… you can make them not very noticeable.”
Brilliant! I’ve never thought of that, and certainly haven’t read about it anywhere else (well done Jason K!).
I’ve just added that to my ‘To Do’ list.
Regards the Google’s changes – you’re quite right, life is about constant change and it’s far better to just think about it, adapt and move on.
You make a good point about including links to high authority sites lower down your page.
Maybe the way for review sites to go would be to write honest reviews of a range of competing products. Fill the reviews with valuable content that is actually of use to readers. Use cloaked links to your affiliate products and ordinary links to a bunch of their competitors lower down the page.
You might lose some customers, but you might avoid the slap and even gain better ranking… drawing more traffic to your site. Since your reviews are even handed and detailed, you will also enjoy a boost to your credibility…
Google doesn’t allow more affiliate links or any link exchanges.. hence there are chances that those links may be deleted by Google.
[...] see what I mean check out this post by John Cow. Comments [...]
[...] http://www.johncow.com/google-adwords-slap-on-review-sites/ [...]