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Google has declared war on affiliates and smaller publisher for a long time. I recall reading a report from someone who attended a party or such and met someone who worked at Google. The employee asked what they did to which they replied that they were an affiliate. The Google employee then replied something to the effect of "Ohhh! They hate you guys!" I can't recall the source it may have been from here but it seemed credible at the time.
If you think about it their algorithms are 1/3 a popularity contest and 1/3 a race to see who can give away the most unique content. It's no surprise then where most legitimate affiliates are going to end up with their sponsor content and their legitimate affiliate back links to the sponsor- at the bottom. That's right. Google actually penalizes you in the end for linking back to the sponsor which provided you with the content. It may not be called a penalty but that's what it ends up doing. Think about it.
I still do okay on some sites but as a rule those sites don't have much affiliate content or links. They probably avoid detection as being a "porn affiliate site". And yes there are exceptions.
The irony is that if every small publisher and affiliate were to put up a button for Bing or another search engine like Duck Duck Go with a caption "use these guys because Google sucks!" Google would lose a lot of market share within a year or two.
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