europeforvisitors - 10:21 pm on Nov 9, 2002 (gmt 0)

What's the future for affiliate sites--or e-commerce sites, period--in Google?

I think today's affiliate sites are comparable to mom-or-pop DTP businesses in the late 1980s and Web-design businesses in the mid- to late '90s. A lot of people jumped into those businesses and made money for a while, but the window of opportunity didn't last long.

Small DTP businesses were killed at the low end by do-it-yourself programs like Publisher, combined with cheap high-quality printers and Kinko's. At the medium and high end, they were killed by the adoption of digital processes by ad agencies, design studios, and printing firms.

Small Web-design businesses had a brief heyday when every business wanted a Web site but most businesspeople weren't familiar with the Web or how to code pages in HTML. Pretty soon, though, anybody could create an adequate low-end Web site with WYSIWYG programs like Netscape Composer, PageMill, FrontPage, Publisher, or even Word. The medium to high end of the business was taken over by ad agencies, studios, and Web-consulting firms that could offer e-commerce integration, database programming, art direction, project management, and other professional services.

Affiliate sites (the successful ones, anyway) have profited from the ability to get high rankings in Google and other search engines through clever SEO techniques. But that window of opportunity is closing, just as the DTP and Web-design windows of opportunity did, as Google gives more weight to relevant, original content and less to PageRank. I think we're going to see two types of sites emerge from the wreckage:

1) Large, high-quality e-commerce sites with original content. (Gorp.com might be a good example.) These sites would provide useful information to the reader even if you stripped out the "sell pages" and e-commerce links.

2) Editorially-driven content sites that are supported by affiliate or advertising income.

Of those two categories, I think the editorial sites are in the best position (in terms of free search listings) because they're information-based. Google could very well decide that it isn't a shopping guide, and commercial sites (even good ones like L.L. Bean or REI) should pay for advertising just as they would in the newspaper or magazine world.

In my admittedly biased opinion, it would be neither unethical nor unreasonable for Google to take such a stance. If Google were to say "We see ourselves as being like The Magazine Index, not The Yellow Pages," Google would be perfectly justified in removing shopping pages from its index or--more likely--giving them less weight than information pages. This would accomplish three things:

1) It would improve the perceived quality of search results, because information sites would tend to dominate the most-viewed SERPs. Readers would be happier, and Google would stay ahead of its competitors.

2) It would remove much of the incentive for SEO spamming by affiliate sites and other e-commerce sites.

3) It would encourage businesses to obtain shoppers and leads the way they do in the offline world: through paid advertising and direct marketing.

What do the rest of you think? Will Google continue to provide free referrals to affiliate sites and other e-commerce sites? Or will it find ways to distinguish between information sites and e-commerce sites, with the latter being required to pay for traffic?