Quote:
Originally Posted by cordoba
The whole idea of affiliate marketing is to get to the top of Google, and to get the search engine visitors to a sponsors site as quickly as possible. The successful affiliate marketer is now going to be penalised by Google.
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I sympathize with you. Really, I do. However, two words sum up your line of thinking: false dichotomy. There is no EITHER OR CHOICE. Google has made it a point over and over again that its main loyalty is to its user base. This means quality search results. This also means quality adword ads. Remember, all the bellyaching because Google's Quality Score system put the kibosh on all those instant milionaires pimping Google Adsense Arbitrage a few years back? Big G was willing to leave money on the table all in the spirit of a better "quality experience" for its users.
Panda is just the latest manifestation of this ongoing quality campaign. Frankly, I think it isnt working. There are many #1 results in the niches I cover that are off category/not real quality results. Still, you can see that they are TRYING.
I quoted part of your original post above because it highlights the FALSE DICHOTOMY. Affiliates' interests and loyalty is to themselves. Sure, some may use quality original content to reach their objectives. Others would prefer to use spun crap or glorified Circle Jerk methods.
If anything, Google's recent moves are making affiliates move past the FALSE DICHOTOMY of Google's way or My way and more towards "How can I best serve my target market?" Maybe instead of focusing on how people can get one over Google, they should look at its professed mission to serve content consumers and ALIGN THEIR INTERESTS with that mission. If this is the case, the affiliate model isn't going anywhere. You would have become a collaborator in adding real value to the Internet instead of one in millions trying to hatch ways of diverting some of that yummy traffic through blog farms/autoblogs/cookiecutter tube CJ sites and many other common methods that are now facing the wrath of the Panda and its upgrades.
The bottomline is quality will always win out. I remember in 2001 a big brouhaha here over Traffic versus Content. Now we're back to content
If you think Social media marketing is the Magic Bullet out of this conundrum, think again - retweets on Twitter and viral explosions on Facebook are propelled in part by QUALITY CONTENT.
If anyone needs quality mainstream content, hit me up at
[email protected]