Rufus_dog - 8:19 am on Sep 1, 2007 (gmt 0)

Does anyone use affiliate sites and organic search results to generate income? I worked very hard to improve the ranking of some keywords with anchor texts in incoming links in the past 2 years. But recently, I found that these keywords were losing ranking to the merchants I advertise for. For example, if I am an affiliate of a merchant (ABC) which sells shoes, and I have been using "cheap running shoes" as archor text in incoming links, I used to rank well for the keyword phrase "cheap running shoes" but now, I realize the merchant (ABC) get better ranking than me for this keyword even though they may not target this keyword themselves. It is like my hard work (and income) is lost and the merchant ends up getting the benefit of my SEO effort. Does anyone notice the same thing?