Questionable affiliate page designs

sponsored links only pages ranking high

[johnquest]

I've been lurking on this forum for awhile and as an aspiring affiliate page designer I'm wondering why there are so many pages with just sponsored links that rank high. Typically, they all look the same. Sponsored links on the page with links to pages with more sponsored links on the right or left. Type in any type of product in your url and you'll usually see these pages. digitalcamera comes to mind as an example. Don't these pages break some kind of rules?

Thanks,

john

[johnquest]

If all I need to do for affiliate designs are pages like these simple sponsored link pages, then what's the use developing article sites and sweating over how to find/ develop good content? There are some of these pages I've seen that rank in the top 10 on google. Anyone know how developers do this and get away with it?

John

[johnquest]

Any commenters out there? Seriously, are these kind of pages legitimate affiliate techniques or what? They look like parked pages, but if they were parked I wouldn't think they would show up in Google results. The pages look like a parked site design that's been launched and SEO'd. I'd post some but I can't. How do you post examples of Web sites here?

John

[ska_demon]

If all I need to do for affiliate designs are pages like these simple sponsored link pages, then what's the use developing article sites and sweating over how to find/ develop good content? There are some of these pages I've seen that rank in the top 10 on google. Anyone know how developers do this and get away with it?

These kind of sites use all the black hat tricks under the sun to get rankings. They also do not last very long before they are thrown out of any index.

Most people here bang on about writing useful unique content because their business model is on built around long term sustainability. A business that will last the tests of time and offers something of use to their users.

The kind of site you are talking about is designed to make as much money as possible before it is junked, to be replaced by another one.

Ska

edit: appalling grammar, not much better now ;oP

[cosmokid]

And often what is going on with these sites is that they have used a page generator software program to generate literally thousands of dummy pages optimized for certain keywords, so Google suddenly thinks the site is an authority site with huge amount of content - until someone at Google either manually delists the site or their system spots it. People in the black hat community will put up several of these sites a day, rake in money from Adsense (sponsored links) and then move on to creating more sites. Black hatters register hundreds of domains at a time to create these junk sites. Their income is slowing down now because in Adwords a lot of advertisers are choosing the option NOT to run their ads on "content" sites (i.e. normal websites with text) and are only allowing their ads to run in Google search. This cuts out the black hatters who were formally doing very well with built for Adsense sites.

Google can spot the imprint of sites made with page generator software, so the black hatters have had to get smart and change the templates and design new software to generate those thousands of pages. But black hatters can often stay one step ahead of Google, and even if their sites are just up for a few weeks and they make Adsense money from it, they consider that a success.

If Google were nicer to the white hatters and not putting new sites into the sandbox for months at a time after a site starts up, I think web designers would be less motivated to use black hat techniques. Right now I'm hitting that point (as a baby newbie site designer) where I'm getting awfully tired of making constant updates to my new sites only to see them nowhere in Google with no sales...and here I am providing the good content that Google claims it wants. So it's kind of a big poopy mess right now, trying to start out with new sites doing them the "right way," yet also being aware of how some black hatters are still making lots of money.

As a white hatter you can starve doing things the right way and waiting for your sites to get traffic (assuming you dont' have the budget for PPC, which I don't at the moment; trying to use organic search as a traffic source.)

Cosmokid

[farmboy]

John,

It sounds like you're describing what is called "MFA" sites by people involved with AdSense.

If you'll go over to the AdSense forum here at WW you can find lots of discussions on the topic.

FarmBoy