Affiliate Sites and Google

Huge Drop in Traffic after Last Update

[hbirnbaum]

Anyone notice a significant decrease in traffic to Affiliate sites from Google, after this last update? Is Google cracking down on Affil sites. Any ways around this?

[hunderdown]

Depends on what you define as an affiliate site. I have a ton of links to Amazon, but I was not affected at all by this last update. In fact, over the past year, my traffic from Google has approximately doubled.

I suspect that Google is making some kind of distinction in its algorithm between content sites that ALSO have affiliate links, and sites that are built entirely around affiliate links. I have a lot of meaningful content on my site, and I think that's what Google "sees."

So, as is often suggested on these boards, maybe you need to develop more content.

[TrustNo1]

"Is Google cracking down on Affil sites."

No.

"I suspect that Google is making some kind of distinction in its algorithm between content sites that ALSO have affiliate links, and sites that are built entirely around affiliate links. I have a lot of meaningful content on my site, and I think that's what Google "sees."

Google and any SE sees any text on a web page as content be it a page with lots of words and no affiliate links or a page with nothing but affiliate links.

[europeforvisitors]

Google and any SE sees any text on a web page as content be it a page with lots of words and no affiliate links or a page with nothing but affiliate links.

That's just supposition, and in any case, algorithms and filters are likely to change over time.

One thing we can be sure of is that Google is working hard on refining its "duplicate content" filters, which could be bad news for affiliate sites that rely on vendor-supplied boilerplate copy.