Earlier in the year I wrote an article about Google’s policy changes and how it affected the home based affiliate. It was centered around the policy changes made in January of 2005 and was a review of the changes I had seen over a year I wrote in the article the importance of writing quality landing pages for affiliate links and incorporating the links into article type formats. The benefits of doing this was to offset Google’s policy of only one url per site including merchant and all affiliate urls in the sponsored advertising column of Google’s search result pages. By creating a keyword relevant web page and doing minimal seo work it is possible to offset and in fact even work this policy to your advantage.
Now it seems not only does Google want to limit their sponsored results obtained through ppc to one url per program but that they are making a concerted effort to totally eliminate all affiliate links from ppc results by placing the minimum bid beyond the range of the normal work at home affiliate. How they have justified this is by claiming to installed a page quality ranking system where by pages with low ranking will have excessively higher minimum bids. In fact many webmasters are now reporting bids starting at ten dollars us per click. One poor chap was selling a product for $4.95. So even if he had a 100 percent sales rate on his paid for clicks he would be making a US 5.05 dollar lose every click. His business is basically wiped out till he can organize an alternative supplier of traffic.
Now I see the long term wisdom of Google doing this, They have to protect their business and with the poor or sometimes not quite relevant or duplicate results returned it is easy to see users becoming immune or ignoring all together the sponsored ads. We all saw how quickly banner advertising lost its effectiveness. What I do find a little unnerving is the seemly arrogance and perhaps short sightedness by doing this in the manner they have. Surely they would have been better served to have given some warning the reasons behind the changes rather than state your website lacks relevance and quality if you improve this we will look into the situation with your site. As it stands now looking through forums that cater to the ppc webmasters it is apparent that Google is going to lose a large portion of their adwords accounts to other providers.
Now on the other hand those with adsense accounts should of noticed some significant increase in the amount their clicks were paid at. I for one have not. Which surprised me having a website in the serps on page one for the keywords work at home on three of the four most used search engines. The number one spot on Google.com for keywords earn online business and many combinations of this centered around keyword phrases using earn, online, home, business, money, work, opportunity. So where is the entire extra click through bid cash going too it certainly isn’t my account. In fact this week I’ve noticed increase of only a few cents per click.
One perhaps short term benefit Is I now see a lot of products mainly ebooks and web site portal generators for Adsense that promised to show the purchasers how to make huge income from click arbitrage now being given away in joint venture promotions and freebies for joining subscriber lists. Probably these entrepreneurs have contributed more to this change needing to be implemented more than any other single other factor. As they are responsible for the huge number of sites that have sprung up to cash in on click arbitrage and as the products didn’t have the right formulas to get listed in the serps they had a total reliance on ppc traffic.
Somehow I get the feeling this is only the beginning So if you read my previous article Has Google’s New Policy Released In January Signalled the End of Work From Home Business Affiliate Links? then you better get concentrating on creating some relevant content laden landing pages for your work from home affiliate links.
