Google’s Love / Hate Relationship With Affiliate Marketers
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Programs, Google, Internet Marketing, seo
This fantastic infographic provided by SEOBook, shows how Google’s attitude towards affiliates has changed over the years. First, they loved you because you bought PPC traffic, then when that traffic began to get noticed by big companies, they started a slow but steady campaign to oust most affiliates from their PPC network; even going as far as to ban many affiliates.
At first you would think that it may be the affiliates problem right? They should have known that their ads would get banned. Not so fast…whenever you delete or pause a PPC ad in Google, no matter how old it is, it still remains in your account. Many affiliates were banned because these old, outdated ads, which may have been deleted or paused, were at the time completely within Google’s terms and conditions; however, because they currently don’t adhere to the rules, they were banned, some for life.
Essentially, Google had them by the throat. They ran completely legitimate ads in Google say in 2005, decided that they didn’t want to run that ad anymore for whatever reason, deleted it, (although still contained within the account, thus, not truly deleted), and then had their account banned because it didn’t adhere with Google’s current terms and conditions.
Can you see the problem here?
Over the years, affiliates have been taking some pretty big hits by Google; either getting their sites pushed down in the search results, or whatever the case may be.
Ironically, during this short amount of time, Google has opened up their own affiliate network. Which leads one to wonder if these same sites were to promote products from Google’s affiliate network, would it make a difference in rankings? I haven’t tested this but would sure be curious to hear of anyone who has.
So, all this rant out of the way, here’s the infographic I was telling you about…
Internet Marketing Infographics by SEO Book
Spy on Your Competition – Legally
If you’ve ever wondered how those top affiliates from ClickBank, Commission Junction, PayDotCom, LinkShare and more make their money, this video will show you some of the insights into their PPC programs.
This is very powerful information to have at your disposal. Enjoy.
Kristine
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Protect Your Affiliate Links
I’ve just created a *very* quick video on how to protect your affiliate links using PHP.
I created this video because I was pitched a product today that was selling a program that automatically does this for you – for $19.99 or $19.97 … can’t remember really but, it was near $20.
It is so easy to do this yourself that I created a video for you showing you how. I was appalled actually that someone was trying to *sell* you this information.
So here’s how to protect your affiliate commissions from being stolen the *right* way.
P.S. If you can’t quite see the code that is shown in the video, I’ve placed it below for you.
1. Create a web page on your LINUX server that has a .php extension. Doesn’t matter what you name the page, just so long as you can identify it.
2. Within this new page, strip out all excessive code, the html, the body, etc. You don’t need this extra “stuff” in there for what we’re doing.
3. Put the following code on your web page AS IS with the exception of where it says “your affiliate link here”.
4. Be sure you place the ENTIRE URL including the http:// portion of your affiliate link here.
5. Save the file.
6. Point people to this page when recommending your affiliate products.
