Once again Google is sending a little warning about thin affiliate sites. Our friend Matt Cutts tweeted today about it and that usually means something is going to happen. While he is talking about auto generated sites that the porn industry is using, if they throw a filter on the search results we could see some good affiliate sites being taken down also.
If I was a merchant and had the same datafeed as the ones I give my affiliates and I also use my main merchant url to give id’s to inhouse affiliates I would be changing that practice asap.
If you are a merchant and you have affiliates outranking you and it is with your datafeed you probably already got caught up in a penguin penalty but this filter will probably really catch you.
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Matt Cutts @mattcutts | Jan 27, 2014 |
| A good reminder about thin affiliates, esp. in porn: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/01/affiliate-programs-and-added-value.html … Cookie cutter sites usually don’t add value. | |||
It may be a good idea to read up on Google affiliate programs in the Google Webmaster Guidelines.
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Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Affiliate programs and added valueMonday, January 27, 2014 at 1:46 PM Webmaster level: All Our quality guidelines warn against running a site with thin or scraped content without adding substantial added value to the user. Recently, we’ve seen this behavior on many video sites, particularly in the adult industry, but also elsewhere. These sites display content provided by an affiliate program—the same content that is available across hundreds or even thousands of other sites. If your site syndicates content that’s available elsewhere, a good question to ask is: “Does this site provide significant added benefits that would make a user want to visit this site in search results instead of the original source of the content?” If the answer is “No,” the site may frustrate searchers and violate our quality guidelines. As with any violation of our quality guidelines, we may take action, including removal from our index, in order to maintain the quality of our users’ search results. If you have any questions about our guidelines, you can ask them in our Webmaster Help Forum.
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Another important page concerning affiliate programs. I wonder if this page existed when Google owned an affiliate network. Either way if you are an affiliate and want to make quality sites I would listen to this page.
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Affiliate programs – Webmaster Tools HelpOur Webmaster Guidelines advise you to create websites with original content that adds value for users. This is particularly important for sites that participate in affiliate programs. Typically, affiliate websites feature product descriptions that appear on sites across that affiliate network. As a result, sites featuring mainly content from affiliate networks can suffer in Google’s search rankings, because they do not have enough unique content that differentiates them from other sites on the …
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