Not really, but it could make the job of an online affiliate peddler a total nightmare in the coming months… selling affiliate harvest on the web has just gotten much, much tougher.Why?
Mainly because Google has taken Froogle, which it produced in 2002 and re-named/re-branded it into Google Product Search. Now when anyone searches for a product on the web – Google Product Search will list the harvest and the stores selling them on the web.
Now it should be noted, Google doesn’t charge any fees for these listings and accepts no payment for harvest that show up first; nor does Google make any commissions on sales. Google makes its revenue by selling advertising via Adwords on the Product Search results pages. Any company can submit harvest thru Google Base to be included in Google Product Search.What’s the problem?
Really, there is no problem for the consumer who wants to find the cheapest price for a product. Google offers this fantastic service which will help you find your product. It just cuts out the affiliate peddler who makes a living by promoting harvest on the web and receiving a small commission in return for their work.
But there are some very fundamental issues here that also cuts at the very heart of the Internet as we know it. Is Google varying the rules of how it does business by more aggressively targeting not only specific product keywords but much more broader keyword phrases in their organic search results with programs like Google Product Search? And they’re listing their links first in the organic search results or what everyone has come to believe are organic results. This argument is not new, Google has been taking those top a skin condition for years albeit directing buyers to other companies with the best prices and offers.
But, is Google now not just targeting a product name or product – but targeting and listing in the #1 spot all the broader keyword phrases which have until recently been dominated by the ordinary website owner? And even in your own iGoogle personal search, you can NOT place your choice ABOVE this Google Product Link.
The real tough question here: isn’t Google going from a search engine to a website creator and operator in this process? Is Google now not only providing the results; but is it now making web pages to match those results? There’s nothing incorrect with that, Google can do what it wants, but for the small affiliate peddler it means competition. Huge competition. In other words, every website on the net now has Google as a potential competitor in organic search.
Of course, how far Google goes with this broader keyword targeting has yet to be seen. Only time will tell if Google does indeed have affiliate links and affiliate sites in its thwart-hairs. Many affiliate marketers on the web will be waiting nervously for the answer to that question.
Again, most people would agree with what Google is doing, since most affiliate marketers only hype the harvest they’re selling and getting those affiliate based sites out of their search results and off the web may not be a terrible go on Google’s part and for the web as a total.
But, are consumers now getting the real information on harvest they’re buying? One of the fantastic things about the Internet is that it has permanently offered various types of information and viewpoints on any subject topic – including the harvest that we buy on the web. By placing itself first in organic search results, Google is saying its information and listed harvest are the ones you should be getting.
Many affiliate marketers have spent years researching and studying a particular product niche and they place forward valuable in-depth information on their sites about a particular product or service. They also place forward comprehensive general knowledge about harvest, air force and subjects that many searchers genuinely want to find when they search the web for information. It doesn’t permanently mean going frankly to the merchant to buy a product, many shoppers want information first, then make their choice.
While others will argue what’s the huge deal, isn’t Google also giving other search results besides the top spot? Yes, but as any peddler who has had a # 1 ranking in Google or any search engine for that topic, will know the top spot gets the majority of the traffic. So Google, by reserving the top spot for itself, will now receive the majority of the traffic, which it can exploit with its advertising.
Google is smart. Google has smart people. And smart people know the longer you have a web surfer on your site and not on a name else’s site, the more cash you will make on advertising. By taking the top spot in organic search for every profitable keyword that’s searched, and keeping those searchers on web pages derived from those results, Google can make more business for itself. The poor affiliate peddler and every other website owner will just have to descend for second place.
Posts Tagged ‘Kill’
Will Google Product Search Kill Internet Affiliate Marketing?
Friday, September 10th, 201010 Ways to Kill Your Site
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010This post covers 10 common mistakes people make with their technical SEO.
I had the privilege of explaining to a name recently that the 5k he had just spend on his new website recently was not cash well spent. The total site was one flash file, and had no text content, making it invisible to search engines. The sad part was that the site didn’t need flash – animation things were limited to mouseovers on buttons, easily replicated using javascript.
Just because Google says they can read content within swf files doesn’t make it a excellent thought. If search engine rankings are vital, make sure there is plenty of text content for spiders to find.
When you replace that ancient Frontpage site with your swanky new CMS and completely exchange all URLs on the site, make sure you setup 301 redirects from the ancient pages to the new pages.
If you don’t, all the links you have genuinely been accumulating will now be broken, meaning Google is likely to ignore them for ranking purposes, and webmasters are likely to remove them from their sites.
Anyone who has gone through the process of building links genuinely will know how precious these are, so 301ing the ancient pages to the new pages is critical.
It takes only a few minutes to do, pay a name to do it if you have to.
Putting a terrible line into your robots.txt file is a pretty quick way to axe your site from the search results. If you don’t know what robots.txt is all about, then perhaps it’s worth thinking twice about playing with it?
Google has a tool for checking your robots file, so take the time that any changes are done correctly.
I despise this one so much. Who really knows if the H1 is weighted heavily or not in Google’s algorithm, but my gut feeling is that it is vital. I so evenly see websites where the major bearing on the page is not a H1, it’s a styled paragraph or simply a div.
CSS can be used to redefine the styles for existing page elements, such as H1 headings, so it just makes significance to use a H1 tag for your major bearing.
It’s really simple to stick a meta description into your website template and see it used on every page of your site. Unfortunately, this can axe your site from the search results pretty quickly. If you have a sitewide meta description, then all it takes is a more powerful site to steal your meta description and suddenly they will be ranking instead of you (your site will be lost in the duplicate content filter).
Take the time to use a unique meta description on every page, or leave it blank.
The splash page or flash intro page is essentially an empty page (as far as the search engines see it) with a single link to your homepage.
What this means is that your navigation structure is now one amount deeper. The page that would have beena PR5 is now a PR4, and Google visits your “homepage” less evenly (because the splash page is really the homepage).
If you really really must use a flash intro or splash page, do the right thing and add a small paragraph of text at the bottom for the search engines to see. Also place links to your other top-amount pages, not just the homepage, so the link juice spreads around the site properly.
I have seen some appealing ways of rewriting URLs, and my favourite had to be the 404 method. In the end, every page returns a 404 header, and a custom 404 handler (a php script) was used to deliver the page content to the browser.
Unfortunately, Google ignores the content and just sees the 404 error, so this site had no show of appearing in search results.
This is uncommon, but it’s worth using a small extra caution when delivering a 404 to the browser. 404s can spell terrible things for your site when you get them incorrect.
While not strictly a technical issue, nothing screams “don’t link to me” like an affiliate thin content site crawling with Adsense. If you expect to do well in the search engines, you need links, and it’s not worth losing links for the sake of a few dollars a month in Adsense revenue.
Advertising is a touch that should be added to an established website with established traffic, it’s unlikely you will get rich from advertising revenue on a groundbreaking new domain with no links.
Har har, I’ll write this paragraph of really crap content with some useful keywords and make it white on a white background so people can’t see it.
Thing is, it doesn’t take much more effort to make excellent content with useful keywords in it and make it visible to your users. People spend time making dodgy doorway pages when they should be optimising their content pages. Count crap hidden content to the homepage when they should be writing excellent sales copy.
Black hat tricks like this are an invitation for other webmasters to burn you (Google never finds out on it’s own). Previous to going ahead with a black hat scheme, look for white or grey hat alternatives first.
I once brought a site from top 60 rankings to top 20 by doing nothing other than removing 14 out of 15 versions of their homepage.They had…www.domain.co.nzdomain.co.nzwww.domain.co.nz/default.aspwww.domain.co.nz/default.asp?pageid=1www.domain.comwww.otherdomain.co.nzotherdomain.co.nzsecure.domain.co.nzsecure.domain.co.nz/default.aspetc.
Each version of the homepage had a certain amount of link authority, and the version with the most power showed up in the search results. I redirected all that link power into the main page, and all of a sudden, the rankings jumped, having changed nothing else.
Is your site wasting precious link juice on duplicate versions of yoyur homepage?
There are plenty of other ways to kill your website in the search engines, and I have deliberately skipped some of the obvious and less appealing ones. SEO is evenly less about doing things well and more about not doing things terribly – Intresting SEO Articles