1. Avoid Being a Thin Affiliate

OK, so what’s all this about thin affiliates?

In a “leaked” document reportedly coming from Google, the big G gave guidelines to human spam-busters on how to classify affiliate sites as thin or not.

A “thin affiliate” is basically one that creates pages with the sole intention of ranking well and directing traffic to an affiliated merchant site, without adding anything unique to the World Wide Web.

It seems that the algorithms at Google HQ are no longer the only ranking factors involved in where your pages end up in the search results.  Now, human beings are scouring the Internet looking for sites to penalise.

Here is the report:

http://www.searchbistro.com/spamguide.doc

(If you get asked for a username and password, just cancel twice, and the document should show up).

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• Buzz it up
• Buzz it up
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post

 Print This Post

Related Articles

• 1.2. Spam Techniques - In the “leaked” raters report mentioned earlier, Google goes on to highlight several common spam techniques.  Here they are: Spam technique 1 – Sneaky redirects Have you ever clicked on a search result in Google, but the URL you end up at is not the one listed in Google’s results? = SNEAKY REDIRECT. Similarly, if you click on
• 1.1. Google Report Analyzed - Some have called it a hoax, others have seen it as the end of affiliate marketing, but if you actually read this report, you will hopefully see what I see: (a) Affiliate sites are here to stay (b) If you do things right, you will end up with less competition from other affiliate marketers (since so many
• 25.1 Advantages to Owning your own Products - So, what are the advantages to owning your own products? Well, there are a lot of advantages. I have summarised a few of them below. 1. Selling your own products from a website can make that site unique. You are offering something no other site does (even if you get affiliate to sell for you). This means
• 2. An Overview of Building Fat Affiliate Sites - There is a lot of planning and decision-making involved in starting an affiliate site. It is tempting to take short-cuts because everyone wants to see quick results. However, I cannot emphasize enough the need to take your time. Follow each stage carefully, and don’t move on to the next until you are
• 12.3.1. Writing Reviews - You should be familiar with the product. While you wont always own the product (and don’t want to buy it), you can find enough information online at the search engines. When writing reviews, I use a set of questions to help create the article. These questions may look familiar: What are the problems faced by your