Jagger and affiliates

[vfilip]

It seems that affiliate sites have been beated hard by Jagger update and top position in Serps have been taken by big merchant suppliers with 50K+ pages .
First beat was by duplicate content filter .
2nd beat with Jagger!
How can affiliates survive?
Start hiding affiliate links behind post forms or Javascript?
Has anyone survived? and how?

[frup]

You need a real site with real content, the affiliate links need to be incidental advertising, not the core of the site. That's my best advice.

[hannamyluv]

three letters... PPC ;)

[futuresky]

I don't do any kind of hiding on my sites but was thinking similar to you today vfilip about puting the affiliate links in well-encrypted javascript, seeing as google really seem to dislike affiliate sites now...was expecting this to come with all the huge datafeed sites that have been created in the last couple of years...things have gradually got worse for affiliate sites but jagger seems to be the final confirmation that google hates most of them :-( .

However, I've done quite a bit of searching tonight about the javascript link thing and get a very strong fear from what I've read that there's too much risk of being hammered even worse (if that's possible) or banned or whatever from google (and if that's the case, I guess possibly other search engines) for this type of thing. I therefore won't be doing this.

PPC at a minimum of 5c per click won't be profitable for about 99.5% of my pages, so it goes back to "content is king"....been trying to add content recently anyway but its a slow process and the content on my main affiliatte-style site is being treated the same way (number 1 billion or whatever in search results) even though the content pages have no affiliate links.

This is painful.

[growingdigital]

There's always cloacking...

[vfilip]

I agree that "content is king" but if your background is a webmaster or a programmer do you think that spending your day writing articles about "mesothelioma" would be easier?
I am thinking of scheme to put affiliate links behind post forms like What you are searching for? , which shop? what dates? etc.. and after reveal the affiliate link in a javascript window with disabled toolbars , nofollow tags , forbidden for googlebots etc.
Jagger wants to cut off affiliates and put them on PPC campaigns . Affiliates know the game of PPC and that is the target of Google : Increase profits!
If you take a closer look at serps you will see more and more big players . Google has never take a $ from them and it knows it will never take. So it decided to push them up in serps and put the affiliates on the sponsored column.

[wrgvt]

All my affiliate links have been javascripts for years, and it had nothing to do with Google when I started that way. It solved two main problems:

1) Scumware, hijacking of affiliate IDs, was running strong at the time and hiding my affiliate links behind a javascript made them more protected.

2) Updating the link method is easy if it's a javascript. Change the javascript and the linking method is changed across every page of the site.

Google and other search engines could easily follow this type of javascript. I can't imagine the programming for that would be that difficult. For all we know, they may already do so.

I should also mention that my product pages have a lot of content: synopses, reviews, features, etc. This data is not supplied via a datafeed. It's unique content based on a lot of work and research on my part and often times my pages have more information than the e-commerce site. Some of my sites do very well with the SERPs and I haven't seen any difference with the latest Google updates. Whether the javascript affiliate links affect that, I have no idea.

Other sites don't do well with the search engines, and I never thought they would. Too much competition and I'd need a million backlinks to ever do well in the SERPS. Intelligent use of AdWords solves this problem.

The affiliate world changes constantly and you have to learn to adapt or you're dead. Every time the e-commerce sites change their rules, every time Google changes AdSense or AdWords, every time a new player comes into the game like YPN or Chitika, you have to figure out how to adapt and do it quickly. Building in adaptable elements into your sites like javascripts and include files are part of that methodology for me.

[Atomic]

You need a real site with real content, the affiliate links need to be incidental advertising, not the core of the site. That's my best advice.

Well said. You can spend time writing good content or hire people to write for you or spend time fretting about lost traffic and then even more time re-writing code in the hopes traffic comes back. Either way you will spend time and money but the site with the good content will most likely see its traffic increase over time. There's never any guarantee about that but your chances of continued success are much higher.