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).