Proof Google Hates Affiliate Sites

Angel of Wealth

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Quote from the recently leaked Google Guidline Manual:
http://brighthouseremotes.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/general_guidelines.pdf


5.1 Thin Affiliates


A thin affiliate is a website that earns money from affiliate commissions. It exists only to make money. The spammer shows content from other “real” merchant sites, such as Amazon or eBay, or a good hotel or travel website. When users click on links to buy products or make reservations, they are redirected to the “real” merchant page.

The thin affiliate offers no additional information and does not try to help users. This is a moneymaking spam technique.
[SOURCE] Page 105
 


And if you build an affiliate site with offers of the same products from different vendors, you are building a comparison shopping site.

Not to mention, a good masthead designer can work wonders in getting past a manual inspection.
 
If you read the following pages you'll see they provide a ton of caveats to that section, with numerous items that indicate a site shouldn't be penalized as a thin affiliate site. From what I got out of it with that section, it seems they're actually practicing what they preach, and giving preference to unique, high value content.

The more interesting part of it was that in my understanding, Google won't penalize you for having a 'thin' site if you process your own payments, or if you make your contact and whois look as though you're the actual merchant. Probably me reading too much into it there though
 
If you read the following pages you'll see they provide a ton of caveats to that section, with numerous items that indicate a site shouldn't be penalized as a thin affiliate site. From what I got out of it with that section, it seems they're actually practicing what they preach, and giving preference to unique, high value content.

The more interesting part of it was that in my understanding, Google won't penalize you for having a 'thin' site if you process your own payments, or if you make your contact and whois look as though you're the actual merchant. Probably me reading too much into it there though

Forget which page in the guide, but apparently coupon and price comparison sites are good as they offer value to the visitor...despite being pretty thin and full of affiliate links.

Think fully populated contact pages with maps and addresses and shit were also listed pretty well as signs that a site was automatically not spammy. Am currently testing that one out ;)
 
Google doesn't hate Affiliate sites, it just hates shitty spammy sites with tons of shitty scammy affiliate offers - it just so happens a good majority of affiliate sites are shitty and spammy.
 
they specifically referring to sites that clone a sites content, say amazon, they make themselves look like a retailer of goods, you land on their pages, and seemingly they are an ecommerce site that has the item in stock, has a destription and an ecommerce interfact, you click buy and it directs you to amazon using an affiliate link.

IMO this is good, shows google are tidying up the serps, nobody wants serps to be polluted by these results, (except for the 0.001% of seos who resort to these tactics).

These guys are one step better than those scum who do cookie stuffing and load a browser with affiliate tracking cookies to tonnes of different sites like ebay, amazon, clickbank etc. without legitimate leads.
 
I can prove Google LOVES affiliate sites with duplicate content and spammy blog comment backlinks from asian TLDs
 
Don't see what the problem here is. Provide unique, valueable content along with your affiliate offers and you should be fine. The days of scraping together shitty filler spun content are, for the most part, gone.
 
google believes in quality content.if u r using the promotional language in the content it looks spammy to google.
 
I think Google made it perfectly clear in late 2008 when they carpet-bombed tens of thousands of accounts
 
It's quite easy to not be labeled as a spammer, as the industry standard shows you need to have over 2400w on your page including pictures and videos and you can get away :). I never been hit if i had a lot of content on the site.
 
Can someone please analyze me and tell me if I'm a thin affiliate or not?

Google has its own affiliate program so it wouldn't even be possible for them to hate "all" affiliates, unless they just have that to know who we are and put us in concentration camps some day.