skibum - 12:00 am on May 27, 2006 (gmt 0)

The biggest affiliates at CJ are not SE dependent type affiliates so I don't buy anything that says it's because of the SE's.

I'd bet there are plenty of performers who are heavily dependent on search, but I don't think this has anything to do with SE degredation. If people are stuffing the SERPs with data feed pages, they'll still do it with javascript links. Even if affiliates are not entirely dependent on search for immediate sales, what site isn't dependent on search for growth?

I haven't seen anything that would indicate that affiliate links hurt SE rankings. If a site has no content or load of dup content, it will get dumped eventually, affiliate links or not.

Thinking in terms of advertiser/publisher is the wrong approach. If CJ wants to be an advertising network then this may be the right direction to go. Affiliates are not marketers, they are sales people or organizations.

Javascript (or any kind of automatic) banner updates would be a blessing but just as a sales person must cater their delivery when trying to close the deal, affiliates need to be able to cater the sales presentation to their audience, integrate it into the content of the site and the source of the traffic.

Banners are the standard brochures sales people may hand out to prospective customers but the content is the sales pitch. If a sales person had to walk around with a tape recorder from corporate management that repeated the same thing to every prospect, they wouldn't sell much of anything.